Avant-garde classicalists Ensemble Meitar to commemorate events of October 7

Avant-garde classicalists Ensemble Meitar will perform their multi-faceted, interdisciplinary works in a special commemorating October 7 that will weave together interviews with survivors, video art work, spoken texts, and live music that ranges between jazz, classical, and world music.

Taking place in Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art, on October 5, the performance, Hope Dies Last, derives its title from a poignant source.

“It’s a line that Nadav Goldstein used to say,” explains Amit Dolberg, a formidably talented pianist, artistic director of Ensemble Meitar and the driving force behind this project. “Nadav was murdered on October 7 in front of his wife and four children. Moments later, his elder daughter Yam was murdered. His wife, Chen, and three children were kidnapped to Gaza and returned home after 51 days of captivity.”

Dolberg describes this concert as the most important thing he has done. It no doubt required much time and effort, just logistically speaking, from the number of people involved. “We have been working on this project since November for the purposes of which I have assembled a team of talented friends, together, we tried to find the right way to commemorate the tragic events of October 7,” he said.

Orchestras and ensembles admirably struggle to find the right way to express their empathy with survivors and those affected by dedicating different concerts or commissioning new compositions, for example, as we saw with the Israeli Philharmonic. “We wanted our concert to be about the survivors” explained Dolberg, “We came to realize that these families need to tell their stories in their own words, following that we decided interviews should be an integral part of this concert.” Committed to this project, as with his other concerts, Dolberg travels to the southern Gaza envelope, especially to Kfar Aza, to ethnographically film a series of interviews with some of the survivors.

Widening our perspectives

Next, in order to widen our perspective on that tragic day, the recorded interviews were embedded in a video art work: “The idea was to show the beauty of the Kibbutz, in the parts that were not destroyed, and contrast it with the destruction and carnage in those parts that were.”

The images coming up on the different media channels from Kfar Aza and other kibbutzim, are heartbreaking.

 “It all tells a story of profound sadness, said Dolberg, “Massive destruction and bullet holes everywhere, walls that are covered in writings by soldiers and Zaka personnel (the disaster identification team), such as ‘Human remains on the sofa’, or ‘dead terrorist in yard,’ I still don’t know how to deal with it.”

Dolberg and Ensemble Meitar will be playing throughout the concert as a piano sextet for flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, and cello. Usually, their attire rotates around the modern and the avant-garde, in this case however, they decided on a different approach that addresses wider audiences.

“The music will span jazz, classical, and ethnic world music.”