Suite Hebraique - Viola (or Violin) and Piano

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was a composer, conductor, composition teacher, and music school administrator.  He was Swiss-born and took advanced studies in Germany and France.  He became an American citizen in 1924, but lived in Switzerland again during 1930-39.  He had briefly been a symphonic conductor in Switzerland and continued to appear as a guest conductor, mostly of his own works.

His music was by turns spiritual, nationalistic, or abstract.  He is best known for his rhapsody for cello and orchestra entitled Schelomo, but he was also a vesatile composer for other solo instruments, piano, string quartet, chorus, and orchestra. 

Bloch suffered from numerous afflictions, including nervous troubles, suicide attempts, and cancer.  He was married with three children. 

During the 1910s Bloch taught at the Conservatory of Geneva and the David Mannes School in New York.  He was founding director of the Cleveland Instutute (1920-25) and director of the San Francisco Conservatory (1925-30).  He gave lectures at the University of California at Berkeley from 1939 to 1952.  He continued composing until 1958.

Bloch composed Suite Hebraique in 1951 and dedicated it to the Covenant Club of Illinois.  One of the Club's members, Samuel Laderman, had been secretary of an association that sponsored a Bloch Festival in Chicago in 1950.  Two versions of the music were composed consecutively, a version with piano and then a version with orchestra.  Milton Preves, then principal violist of the CSO, gave the first performances of both versions, the piano version with Helen Brahm at the Covenant Club in March 1952 and the orchestral version with Rafael Kubelik and the CSO in January 1953.