Schelomo: Hebraic Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra

Schelomo, Hebrew for Solomon, plays as one continuous rhapsody rather than a set of separate movements, but it moves through clear stages. It opens with the cello alone, unaccompanied, speaking in a free, speech-like melody that sets up its role as the voice of Solomon himself; the orchestra answers with dark, richly colored chords built from winds, harp and low strings. As the piece continues, the orchestra grows more active and at times overwhelms the soloist in sheer volume and color, evoking Solomon's court in all its splendor, brass and percussion included, before receding again to let the cello speak. Several passionate climaxes rise and fall this way, the cello alternately pleading, declaiming and retreating into quiet melancholy. Near the end the energy drains away: the cello's line grows sparser and lower, the orchestra thins out, and the piece closes not in triumph but in resignation, in keeping with the biblical text's famous refrain that all is vanity. There is no cadenza in the traditional concerto sense; the cello's most exposed material comes at the very opening and again near the close, framing the big orchestral outburst in between.

Ernest Bloch composed Schelomo in Geneva around 1915 and 1916, the culminating work of what became known as his Jewish Cycle, a group of pieces written as Bloch searched for a musical voice rooted in his own Jewish heritage rather than in the German symphonic tradition he had studied. He originally planned to set text from the Book of Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to King Solomon, but found the words resisted music and instead let the solo cello speak in place of a singer, carrying the character's voice wordlessly. The piece had its premiere at Carnegie Hall on May 3, 1917, with the cellist Hans Kindler as soloist and Artur Bodanzky conducting, on a program that also included the premiere of Bloch's Israel Symphony. Schelomo quickly became, and has remained, the best known piece in the Jewish Cycle and one of the cello repertoire's essential concert works.