· Di Naye Hagode - Review in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal (Milken Archive/Naxos)

Excerpt from the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles April 7, 2006, Cover Story
"PASSOVER: Songs for a Swinging Seder"
By George Robinson.

...The final entry in this year's Pesach sweepstakes is a somber one, Max Helfman's "Di Naye Hagode" (Milken Archive/Naxos). Helfman's oratorio is not, strictly speaking, a Passover commemoration in the strict sense of the word. Rather, it is a 1948 piece he wrote in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on Passover in 1943. Using the seder as a structural armature on which to mount "di naye hagode," that is, "the new telling," Helfman wrote a frequently powerful, occasionally bombastic piece for choir, narrator and orchestra. This recording features particularly forceful contributions from the Choral Society of Southern California, the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale and narrator Theodore Bikel, who never succumbs to the temptation to "emote," wisely allowing Itzik Fefer's stark, bleak text to do the hard work. The CD also features an effective rendition of Helfman's "Hag Habikkurim" and a surprisingly mournful "The Holy Ark." The result is one of the best releases in the Milken Archive series to date.

· Di Naye Hagode - Review in the Forward

Excerpt from the Forward - April 21, 2006
Yom HaShoah Musical Tributes to Tragedy's Victims
By David Mermelstein

Music by those who perished in the Holocaust has lately enjoyed something of a vogue, with both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences discovering the work, and unfilled promise, of composers like Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas and Hans Kr'sa. But what of the music written in the aftermath the Holocaust to honor the dead?

· Di Naye Hagode - Review in The Jewish Week

Special To The Jewish Week
Max Helfman: "Di Naye Hagode" (Milken Archive/Naxos)
by George Robinson

Helfman's oratorio is not, strictly speaking, a Passover commemoration in the strict sense of the word. Rather, it is a 1948 piece he wrote in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on Pesach 1943. Using the seder is a structural armature on which to mount "di naye hagode," that is, "the new telling," Helfman wrote a frequently powerful, occasionally bombastic piece for choir, narrator and orchestra. This recording features particularly forceful contributions from the Choral Society of Southern California, the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale and narrator Theodore Bikel, who never succumbs to the temptation to "Emote," wisely allowing Itzik Fefer's stark, bleak text to do the hard work. The CD also features an effective rendition of Helfman's "Hag Habikkurim" and a surprisingly mournful "The Holy Ark." The result is one of the best releases in the Milken Archive series to date.

Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale, formed for a single concert, is still humming years later.

By Hector Becerra, Times Staff Writer

Esther Hess has a story--a moment of ancestral significance at an old concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia--that explains the power of the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale, and why a group formed for a lone performance is now in its fourth year.

It was 2000. Hess was touring with the chorale. The highlight of the trip was to be its performance of Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" with other choirs and orchestras at Nuremberg, Germany.

But along the way, the chorale went to Terezin to perform the songs of Victor Ullman, a composer who was imprisoned at the concentration camp there and later died in the Holocaust. The singers were taken to the camp. It was a moment Hess both desired and dreaded: She was not the first singer in her family to be there.