Israel Chamber Opera Orchestra's Armenian triumph in Ashdod

• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Author: HAGAY HACOHEN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The sparkling performance launched the new season the Israel Chamber Opera Orchestra now offers. The impressive whale-shaped culture center seemed to shine as patrons patiently produced their coronavirus-required green pass to enter and greeted old friends in Hebrew, Russian and French.

"The ICOO is 30 years old, and we are just getting started," its CEO Moshe Fisher said. When it was established, the orchestra was made possible due to the massive influx of post-Soviet era Jews who built their new homes in the port city. These immigrants provided both the audience – eager to hear Western music performed – and the musicians themselves.

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"At first, the state offered no support at all," Fisher remarked, "it was Rafi Ben-Moshe from the Artists' Absorption Center who opened the first door to us in the mid-1990s." Another cultural powerhouse, the Ballet Valery Panov Theatre, opened a few years later, marking Ashdod as a multi-cultural city where arts are supported. The city boasts not one, but two orchestras, the other is the Israeli Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod. Mayor Yehiel Lasri, Fisher said, invests 1% of the city's budget in the arts.

Mirzoyan's work Symphony for Strings and Timpani is "his most important one and perhaps even for all Armenian music," Papian told the audience. The dialog between kettledrums and strings was so emotionally moving people around me often clapped at the end of each movement. This led a smiling Papian to present four outstretched fingers to the front of the seated rows, indicating silently that more is yet to come. Timpani player Leonid Reshko was outstanding, winning hearty applause all around.

"To match these two works is wonderful," violinist...