Week 13: appreciation/depreciation; the review

A desert concert

The yearly song festival hosted by my home town in Israel is now a long gone history but then, almost fifteen years ago it was still alive and kicking. The jewel in the crown of the many excellent concerts performed for three straight days was always the sunrise concert at the bottom of Massada.

Massada, an ancient Herodian compound of palaces and fortifications on top of an isolated rock plateau, is best known for being the scene of the last rebellion against the Roman army in 73 CE.  It sits on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. On the west side of the mountain in a natural drop in the ground a big amphitheater was created, using the natural slope and lined with stone benches facing the  Roman ramp. The huge artificial slope, leaning against the mountain was created by Roman ingenuity from tons of rocks and sand as a way of reaching the rebels at the top. 

The Concert starts few hours before sunrise. So shortly after midnight, a long line of private cars and buses descended from Arad, few hundred meters above the Dead Sea, into the dark desert. Armed with sleeping bags against the desert chill and the hard benches, and plenty of food to last for the many hours ahead, we settled on one of the benches ready to be entertained.

This was not going to be a usual type of a concert, more like a combination of poem reading and songs performed intermittently. The reading was to be performed by Yonatan Gefen a very popular song writer known mostly for his children poems. Those poems were read in my home for years and each of my daughters had her favorites and so did I. “Gal is the daughter of the sea...The most beautiful girl in  kindergarten...It’s not pleasant to see a locked kindergarten...I always wanted a dog...The wrong Dragon... “and many more. We could cite them, hum them, and remembered them years later with that bitter sweet longing people often sense reminiscing their childhood.  

 And the singer, let’s not forget him, just returning from a year abroad, was David Broza another favorite figure and a remarkable guitar player. Critics have labeled Broza as "a post-modern Leonard Cohen" and the "Stevie Ray Vaughan of rock”. He has also been compared to Bruce Springsteen as well as Gordon Lightfoot and Jackson Browne. Broza's American debut album, Away From Home, was praised by The New York Times as one of the best pop albums of the year. Time of Trains, his second American release, gained him recognition as one of the most important artists on the international music scene.

So I knew it was going to be a good one, still I did not expect it to be such a unique experience. The concert started on time and for the next three hours it was a continuous dialogue between these two performers and the huge crowd. It is hard to comment on the musical or literary quality since the crowed did most of the work. Everyone was singing along with the singer and narrating the words to every poem without missing a beat.

At some point I looked around at this unusual mixture of older couples twice my age, gruff young soldiers holding their weapons on one their side and hugging their girlfriends, cynical high school youngsters, all humming  along and reciting. All completely immersed in the chemistry created by the location, the velvety desert night and the two men on the stage.

As the sun rose over the Dead Sea, it climbed slowly behind the plateau and its rays created a perfect halo that softens the sharp lines of the mountain and broken ancient walls. Then as it climbed even higher it painted the ramp with shimmering whites and yellows reflecting the glow of the desert sand. And yet the crowed did not move, everyone continued with no signs of tiring. On and on the concert kept on going and the sun was getting higher and higher in the sky. The sunrise concert was turning into a late morning soon to be noon.

I’ve been to many concerts since, some were very good but none had that kind of magnetic energy created by good performers an enthusiastic crowd and almost two thousand years of history all combined.