17th July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here
And our protagonist today sings to the secret of Shabbat, in Aramaic. He was born in Ukranian land at the time of the Russian Empire and became the favourite chazan in Chicago: he is Pierre Pinchik
Hello, how are you? I have goosebumps. It is almost impossible for me to write while listening to this recording. Some specific performances has such a power that makes you think “what did this man have inside to sing like that?“. Many cantors has sang Rozo D’Shabbos wonderfully. Pinchik develops unexpected melistama, plays with the phrasing accelerating and slowing down, chews some syllables and uses a soul-stirring vibrato, in this text in Aramaic, for which he created the music.
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A voice from the Golden Age of the Chazanim
Pierre Pinchik was born as Pinchas Segal in 1900 in the Ukranian village of Zhivitov, that was part of Russian Empire at that time. I think it must be now Zhyvotivka, in the oblast of Kiev, Ukraine.
So he grew up in the Czarist Russia, attending the Hassidic Skverer yeshiva, lead by a rabbi that was very fond of music and used to invite cantors. Later, Pinchas changed the yeshiva for the conservatory in Kiev, where he would study piano and voice.
And, after the revolution, he was hired by the new Red Army for touring the country singing folk songs. He served as chazan in Leningrad for 6 years, before moving to the USA in 1927. During that period, he realiced that the classic liturgyc repertoire from the XIX century was not the most suitable for his voice and style, so he rearranged some and also composed some new ones, like this Rozo D’Shabbos.
At the USA his career boosted almost inmediately, he became much appreciated as a cantor and he recorded several albums, signed by the RCA. His main synagogue was K’nesset Israel Nusaḥ S’fard in Chicago. He died in 1971 and is buried in Boston.
I found this portrait and some biographic facts at the website of Geoffrey Shisler and also in Milken Archive. In this last one there are further details of how he got to travel to the USA with documents provided by the poet Itzik Fefer, who would be murdered later in Stalin’s massacre of Jewish poets, also about the first years there, as well as about the Chemelnitzki massacre in XVII century at the birthland of Pinchas.
The song about the secret of Shabbat
The lyrics of the song are in Aramaic, from the Sephardic liturgy of Shabbat. You can find them and the translation into English, here at the blog A Nigun A Day.
You can get the general sense but I think you must be familiar with the Hassidic kabbala to really understand the meaning in all its deepness. If you are, and if you know also Hebrew alphabet, this seems a very interesting explanation at the website of the project It Is Shabbos, by the contemporary cantor Yaakov Lemmer, who has also recorded this song. You can listen him singing it live, here.
Clic the picture to listen to Rozo D’Shabbos by Pierre Pinchik:
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Shabbat Shalom.
Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música