As a way of unlocking moments of inner transformation, no art form can approach the efficacy of song. You could be standing in a supermarket queue or idly listening to the radio, and suddenly it will happen – a melody that undoes you, a lyric that lays bare some secret part of yourself. On rare occasions, a song can change the course of your life.
Australian singer-songwriter Lior.Credit:Simon Schluter
For composer Nigel Westlake, that song was Avinu Malkeinu. The circumstances that led him to it were unusually tragic – in 2008, his 21-year-old son Eli was deliberately run down and killed by a drunk driver. In the weeks and months following the tragedy, Westlake struggled to make sense of his life and his place in the world.
“During that year, I had become swamped in a state of profound grief and I felt I’d lost the impetus, the inclination and the spark to compose music,” he says. He could no longer connect to his craft. He felt lost at sea.
But there was one singer whose work took on increasing importance. “My sons, Joel and Eli, had introduced me to Lior’s music,” Westlake says. “Immediately after Eli’s death, those songs took on a whole new dimension for me – they became associated with loss and the love I had for my son.”
At a fundraising concert that he’d organised to inaugurate a foundation created in Eli’s memory, he saw singer-songwriter Lior in concert for the first time. After the set was over, Lior returned to stage for an encore and closed the night with a raw, a cappella version of Avinu Malkeinu, a Jewish liturgical prayer. Traditionally sung from the beginning of the month of Elul (a time of deep introspection known in Hebrew as cheshbon hanefesh – literally “an accounting of the soul”) and at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Lior’s rendition had a profound effect on Westlake. Though Westlake is not Jewish, and nor does he speak Hebrew, there was something in the song that resonated with him.
“It connected immediately with my heart,” he says. “The piece became a calling for me – a calling back to my identity as a composer and musician.”
Composer Nigel WestlakeCredit:Steve Forrest
He approached Lior after the show and put an idea to him: he would compose an orchestral backdrop for the song, something lush and filmic, to complement Lior’s shapeshifting vocals. Lior was immediately excited about the idea. From there, the project evolved quite organically. Westlake mentioned the collaboration to Peter Czornyj, then the artistic director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, who immediately commissioned them to write a full-length work; after two years’ development, the song cycle premiered at the Sydney Opera House. A live recording of the work charted for 10 weeks and went on to win an ARIA.
This is perhaps no small feat for an album sung entirely in Hebrew and Arabic. It was at Lior’s suggestion that they opted to showcase both Jewish and Islamic texts – drawing on hymns, poetry, and proverbs that spoke to a common theme.
“I thought it would be interesting to find commonality between these two worlds that have had such a volatile history throughout the ages,” Lior says. “It became the blueprint for the greater work of Compassion – a collection of ancient Hebrew and Arabic texts about the beauty and wisdom of compassion, existing side by side.”
It’s this concept, rather than any kind of overtly religious impulse, that animates the cycle. Both Lior and Westlake are atheists, leading them to explore a sense of the sacred, or spiritual, inherent in compassion itself.
“It’s not necessarily grounded in faith or belief,” Lior says. “Rather, it’s bound in humanity and the commonality we share as humans. I believe compassion, largely, is what defines us.”
Compassion first premiered in Melbourne in 2014; this month, it returns to the stage presented by FOJAM (Festival of Jewish Arts and Music) and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The evening also features performances by MSO composer-in-residence Paul Grabowsky AO and Indigenous vocalist Emma Donovan, sharing songs from their most recent country and gospel collaboration, The Old Rugged Cross, while musician Alex Burkoy and chanteuse Billie Tumarkin present a moving piece written in 1941 in the Bialystok Ghetto, and a selection of traditional Ukrainian folk songs arranged by fellow Ukrainian-Australian Nicholas Buc.
For Westlake, the song cycle remains an indelible reminder of his son. “I don’t think I ever would have even considered writing a piece called Compassion before losing Eli. I was much more pragmatic about music and much more tolerant of music that didn’t address the heart,” he says. “After losing Eli, a lot of things within me changed, in terms of the way I listen to music, and the music that I write, and my viewpoint of the world. Those works were stepping stones back into life as I now know it.”
A Night of Compassion is on at Melbourne Town Hall this Thursday, September 29.
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