Eleven members of SAE’s Ein Gedi High School and Residence orchestra traveled to
Germany.
Saxophone player Lior Lev Guichman tells about the experience:
“We are in Frankfort!.
Towards the end of the last school year, Nir Marom, the conductor of the 25 member orchestra of the Ein Gedi settlement and youth development director, carefully selected a delegation of 11 students, for an eight-day trip to Germany with seven performances.
Every evening there is a concert somewhere else. We come with all the gear, set up the stage, amplifiers, billboards etc, perform and take down (about three hours).
The repertoire we play is classic Israeli songs, for example: a medley of Kaveret (Israeli rock band) songs, our tiny country, Jerusalem of gold, etc. We perform in many places. We have performed in synagogues, churches, regular schools and Jewish schools and nursing homes. We performed in front of different populations in religion, age and status. We performed on stages, in school sports halls, in small stages of synagogues and so on.
The overall goal of the project, beyond the musical representation of Israel, is to give us (the members of the orchestra) a real life experience as musicians, to go through performances day after day, to deal with a large audience (and sometimes the audience is actually ten people), to deal with self and social responsibility on ourselves and the group, to experience foreign culture and learn to work as a team.
Beyond that, the purpose of the delegation is to bring the classical Israeli music that we all know and play around to different populations, to come in first contact with Jewish youth who have never experienced our music and have never met Israelis, to chat with Jewish children and share some information about Israel and to tell them about our lives.
Through to the performances we got caught up in a lot of conversations with the audience. After the show we go out and talk to the audience. Personally I had the chance to talk to a lot of people who are not Jews but are very interested in Israel, its life and its culture.
This experience is completely incomprehensible and it’s amazing, I feel like we’ve managed to make real connection with people from other places, made connections and talked to people about a variety of things. It has been an amazing experience.”
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