The Atar Trio Performs To the Bird from a Foreign Land

The Atar Piano Trio and Soprano Tali Ketsef reprise their Bialik-themed concert at Tel Aviv University. Their commissioned piano trio, To the Bird from a Distant Land, was composed in response to Hayim Nahman Bialik’s iconic poem To the Bird (El HaTzipor). The poem, composed when Bialik was just 19, counterpoints his difficult situation in northern climes (Ukraine), with his imaginings of life in the land of Zion. The poem is episodic, moving back and forth between these two places, and between darkness and light. Yet, he also questions whether life in this far-off land is as wonderful as his dreams of it. My response to the poem became a song without words, with the flight of the bird sometimes soaring, while at others caught in the darker moods of Bialik’s imaginings before taking wing again. In the end, the bird and its flight came to represent the poet’s own flights of imagination.This program also features a beautiful assortment of music by Israeli composers, includingEran El-Bar, Aaron Harlap,  Tzippi Fleischer and Alex Wasserman.