'Hashkiveinu' by Max Helfman with Cantor David Montefiore

‘Hashkiveinu’ by Max Helfman
as sung by Cantor David Montefiore
Dr. Gayle Kramer, organist Benjamin Cohen, conductor
Dorothy Duensing, soloist
High Holy Day Services
Temple Beth El of Bloomfield Hills, Detroit
Max Helfman: 1901-1963) was a Polish-born American Jewish composer, choral conductor, pianist, singer, and educator. He had a long career arranging both secular and religious Jewish music and was considered to have a gift for writing music that was both singable and emotionally complex, which was modern and original and yet rooted in traditional folk and synagogue melodies.
en.m.wikipedia...
Among his best known works are is Shabbat Kodesh (1942), a Sabbath Cantata, and his Di naye hagode (1948), a Yiddish-language Cantata about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Max Helfman: here we have a survivor of the horrors of Eastern Europe of Galizia, of Poland and the Center of Yiddishkeit in Europe. Max had within his consciousness the sounds of the synagogue. For when we listen to his compositions, they not only are the products of the academic environment that he was a part of, but we hear all the rest: Copeland, Gershwin, Bernstein and Schoenberg. But he does not surrender to the modern motif, on the contrary, he holds on to the nusach hatefila, which is inherent in all of his compositions.
He just can't stay away from schul and grab a pedestrian campfire melody; that has been the bane of Hazzanim who you wanted to inculcate their congregations with real tradition.
Helfman is one of the true Jewish Music giants of the twentieth century.