Lior Kretzer is certainly looking forward to getting to grips with the Viennese musical menu later this week. The Israeli-born longtime resident of Vienna is a seasoned pianist and educator who spreads his creative skills across a panoply of material, ranging from operatic to classical fare, and art songs. He also has a predilection for operettas and is more than happy with the opportunity to entertain his Tel Aviv audience.

He will be joined on the venture by a couple of young local vocalists, Mika Cohen and Ezekiel Assia, who are currently progressing through the academic stages of their artistic continuum but, says Kretzer, are fully primed for some professional tooth-cutting. “They are serious students studying at a serious academy, but they quickly connect with this domain and say: ‘this is great, what fun,’” he observes.

The pianist, who also serves as musical director of the occasion, is looking to spread the feel-good vibe. “We will get a little more serious [in the concert] but only as far as Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute,’ and we will take from that the nicer parts, like the bird catcher, and the Papageno [duet].” 

The programmatic accent is very much on the smile-arousing side of the musical tracks. “There will be Viennese songs by people like [Jewish Austrian composer and singer] Hermann Leopoldi,” Kretzer adds. “And there will be other songs, some with vocals and others without. The thinking is not so much about devising a suitable program, but more about offering good music and make people feel happy for an hour, an hour and a quarter.” Sounds simple enough. “Especially if you think about what is happening now [in Israel] and about the COVID-19 era, the idea is get people away from that into a different space.”

Kretzer: 'Music allows people a breather from life'

KRETZER IS all for taking a timeout from disturbing reality. “That is one of the things that music can, and should, do – allow people a breather from life without addressing what these people went through so many years ago [in the Holocaust] and what is happening now, in the war. Our job, I believe, is to take people out of all of that, to feel something else, and to warm their hearts.”

The fifty-something Vienna-based musician makes no bones about being enthralled by the world of operetta from the word go. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors and went through horrific experiences. But I remember my grandfather loved listening to operas and operettas. As a kid, when I heard things in German, I didn’t understand where it came from.” That left its imprint on the youngster’s malleable mind, and segued into his own musical road. “When I played the piano, as a child, that stayed with me, in my ears. That’s how my connection came about, and endured.”

He may not have been fully conscious of it at the time, but Kretzer’s pathway through the highways and byways of his musical life had already begun to be mapped out. His relocation to the Austrian capital, nigh on 30 years ago, sealed the deal. “As a classical musician who enjoys working in opera, as soon as you get to Vienna, as a pianist, operas also incorporate operettas. When I got there, I realized I was in the right place to get into that.”

That was not Kretzer’s original intent. “I moved to Vienna to, predominantly, work in chamber music and make progress with my music. People told me the best way to learn the local music is, simply, to play it.” Sounds perfectly reasonable.

“There are all sorts of concerts, not just for tourists, with local musicians playing Viennese music, the way it should be played,” he notes. Kretzer got himself in on the scene. “I managed to join an ensemble [playing Viennese music] and I enjoyed every minute of it. I felt that, every day, I was learning more about what Viennese music was, in Vienna. What could be better than that?” Indeed. “That became part of my nature, and one of things I loved to do.”

IT WAS, by now, abundantly clear that Kretzer’s approach to his craft moves along joyful lines, with a premeditated intent of invoking a sense of pleasure in his audiences. He says that spirit has been around in the art form for centuries, but that some of his counterparts may have lost sight of that core happiness element. “If we think of music, say, 200 years back. Music started out as musical accompaniment. What, really, is chamber music? It is music that went with dancing.”

Naturally, classical music has evolved along all sorts of stylistic directions in the interim. “If you think about a Wagner opera, that you watch for five hours and you don’t always understand the storyline. Music should really have been what we call today, like a musical. It should have been something you enjoy, that you move to or gain simple pleasure from.” Like jazz, I venture. “Exactly,” comes the response. “Today, when you go to a concert you have all these rules of conduct. You mustn’t cough and you have to sit still, and all the musicians look so serious.” 

The man has a point. What, for example, is the fun in watching, say, a string quartet doing their damnedest to do justice to a score by Schumann, skimming their bows across their instruments while looking far from having a good time. The sonics may be there, but the visual side of the concert leaves much to be desired.   

Kretzer feels he and his professional counterparts, and their followers, could do well to take a leaf out of the decorum displayed in more commercial contemporary climes. The latter, by the way, was precisely how one could define the music of Mozart, Schubert, et. al. back in the day, their day. “If we go into a different world of, say, pop or jazz people go to concerts to deliberately have a good time. They can sit, stand or do whatever they want. The artists communicate that to the audience.”

Friday’s crowd can expect to get a sense of pleasure-inducing intent – Vienna-style – when Kretzer, Cohen and Assia take the stage at the Israel Conservatory of Music

For tickets and more information: (054) 622-1604 (Whatsapp) and judith.weinmann@wien-telaviv.com