Pro Musica Hebraica (PMH) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is "to present Jewish classical music – much of it lost or forgotten – in a concert hall setting."
Since April 2008, Pro Musica Hebraica has presented 13 concerts, typically two per year at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
[5] They presented the idea of twice yearly concerts of these neglected masterpieces to Kennedy Center Director Michael Kaiser, who offered his encouragement and support.
Responding to the challenge of European nationalism, the St. Petersburg Society “gave rise to what would become known as Jewish art music—music that deliberately melded Western and Russian classical music with Hasidic melodies, Yiddish folk songs and synagogue chants, capturing the sounds of the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement.”[3] As Charles Krauthammer explained, “It's music that's either consciously or unconsciously drawn from the folk, the klezmer, the liturgical, the shtetl,” and reinterpreted in the spirit of “modern classical sensibility.”[4] The concert presented the forgotten works of composers Joel Engel, Solomon Rosowsky, and Alexander Krein.
For example, in a review of the inaugural concert, the Washington Post wrote that PMH’s inaugural concert was “an auspicious start” to an organization that is “breathing new life into lost Jewish music.”[11] PMH’s Fall 2008 concert—which featured the performance of the ARC Ensemble of Toronto and the music of “last century’s least-known Jewish geniuses,” Mieczsław Weinberg—was called a “powerful performance.”[12] PMH’s Fall 2010 concert—which focused on the work of Karel Berman, Paul Ben-Haim, and Walter Braunfels—was lauded as “enthralling mix” that “riveted the audience's attention.”[13] Its Fall 2011 concert, which included works by Alexander Krein, was described as reflecting “romantic longing and peasant energy, the imperatives of both dance and religion and a reverence for history, all couched in the modality and the emphatic rhythms that characterize so much of what we recognize as a Jewish musical tradition.”[14] Its most recent, Spring 2012 concert, featuring Marc-Andre Hamelin, was praised by Anne Midgette, chief media critic for the Washington Post, as “an intimate and engaging concert” with a “refreshingly intriguing program.”[15] She wrote: “Hamelin did an outstanding job bringing across a lot of unfamiliar music to the audience,” adding: “Hamelin proceeded to play [the second encore] so engagingly that the audience was laughing along with some of the more extreme variations…and jumped to its feet when he was done.”[16] Music critic Stephen Brooke called the Fall 2012 concert "a blazing, larger-than-life performance that seemed to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, even from the depths of chaos.