The Climb of Joy: Ata V’chartonu

By Bentzi Avtzon

If you were by chance walking in the halls of New York City’s Maness School of Music early Sunday morning of last week, you’d have been forgiven for wondering why you were hearing the playing of a chassidic melody in a school known more for its taste in classical music.

You’d also have been forgiven for wondering who in fact was playing this music, and if you’d have taken a peek inside the small room on the fourth floor from which it came you’d have seen an older man with a white beard communicating wildly with his hands to a group of young musicians sitting in a semi-circle.

Who was he? Who were they? And how had they met?

If you’d have entered the room and asked you’d have discovered that the man, Israel Edelson, had once studied in a school not very different to this one and had risen to be the assistant conductor of the world-famous conductor, Leonard Bernstein.

You’d have heard him speak of his love for classical music and how he’d taken that love and poured it into his arrangements of Chabad niggunim.

(Perhaps you’d have asked him how he’d come from Bernstein’s concert halls to Chabad niggunim, but he would have told you to wait: he was here for the musical performance, and it was to be given his full attention.)

And if you’d have asked the young musicians, they’d have told you they were friends who’d come together several months earlier to form the Agnon Quartet and had come across Edelson’s arrangements of Chabad niggunim and fallen in love with them.

(No, they’d tell you, most of them weren’t Chabad, but what could they say: the music spoke to them…)

But of course you weren’t there, and the few magical moments of that Sunday afternoon could have been left only in the memories of the few – and I was one of them – who were lucky enough to be there.

Which is why I made this clip, to share with you a few of those minutes of beauty, talent and pure joy.

VIDEO: The Story of a Niggun | Ata V’Chartonu | feat. The Agnon Quartet

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