The new score of the orchestral overture Palestina is the second edition of music by the Russian Jewish musician Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) that Paula Eisenstein Baker and Robert S. Nelson have completed for A-R Editions, following their excellent 2009 collection of the composer's chamber works.Footnote ¹ The score, a rich orchestral setting for strings, winds, brass, percussion, saxophones, harp, celesta, and organ, was adapted from the manuscript held by Zeitlin's family and is produced in a clean and attractive format that will be useful for both scholarship and performance; to facilitate the latter, rental parts are available from the publisher.

In addition to the score, the editors have provided a detailed introduction and a helpful critical report. The introduction provides a rich explanation of the piece's context, with descriptions of the music played at the Capitol Theatre near Times Square in New York and of Zeitlin's work there, and background information about the commissioning and premiere of Palestina, as well as its critical response. The editors examine the conundrum of the authorship of other orchestral works released by the Capitol Theatre, where a number of pieces certainly or apparently composed by Zeitlin—including Palestina—were instead attributed to the ensemble's conductor, the Russian-born cellist Yasha Bunchuk. Of particular value in the introduction is the editors’ musical analysis, which details the sources of motivic material, scale patterns, and other techniques that have their basis in Jewish musical and biblical tradition.

As the editors explain in their introduction, Zeitlin trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. After graduating in 1910, he worked for over a decade as a musician in St. Petersburg, Ekaterinoslav (today Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), and Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania). In 1923 Zeitlin made the move of so many of his Jewish compatriots in that decade, voyaging overseas to build a new life in New York. Throughout his professional career, he remained deeply connected to the work he had begun as a member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organization he had joined as a student. Based at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the Society, whose members included composers, ethnographers, and performers, was devoted to the study of Jewish musical practices, including cantillation (the chanting of the Hebrew Bible), folk song, and liturgical melodies, and to the development of a new art music idiom that would be recognized as Jewish in character through its incorporation of motifs, scales, and other features derived from the traditional music that Society members were collecting and transcribing.

Zeitlin composed Palestina, named in reference to what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, in 1929 for the Capitol Theatre, a movie house where he played as a violist in the resident ensemble, the Capitol Grand Orchestra. The editors show that the ensemble, like those in many of the larger cinema venues of the time, played overtures to precede screenings, music for live variety shows, concerts featuring celebrated works of the classical canon, and, before the advent of sound film (first introduced by Vitaphone with The Jazz Singer in 1927), musical accompaniment for the films themselves. This meant that the orchestra's repertoire was eclectic, mixing the latest ragtime dances and hits from Tin Pan Alley with orchestral staples such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Zeitlin was involved in a wide range of musical activities at the theatre, from performing in orchestral concerts to producing arrangements of popular numbers such as “When Love Sings a Song in Your Heart.” Zeitlin was well prepared for these hybrid musical efforts by his time in St. Petersburg, where he had studied past masterworks, composed new music, and explored the popular, folk, and religious musical idioms of the region's Jewish communities.

By the time Palestina was commissioned, the Capitol Theatre had for some years been putting on performances of brief compositions on Jewish musical themes around the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Palestina was first performed in the lead-up to Selichot, which falls the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah. The following year it was revived for a radio broadcast to mark the start of the Passover holiday.

Baker and Nelson's detailed analysis of Palestina demonstrates how Zeitlin brought together in this work the needs of the Capitol Theatre and the compositional techniques he had developed as a member of the Society for Jewish Music. Constructed of an introduction and four contrasting sections, the piece repeatedly features imitations of traditional rhythmic patterns played on the shofar, the ram's horn trumpet, a ceremonial feature in the ancient Jewish Temple still heard in the synagogue on the High Holy Days. Palestina also frequently incorporates the augmented second, an interval that was, for many, instantly recognizable in classical compositions as a signifier of Jewish culture or, more generally, of exotic peoples and locales. Here, the interval is generally incorporated as a part of the Ahavah rabbah mode found in a significant proportion of Jewish folk songs, psalms, and prayers. Zeitlin also deploys some preexisting tunes in the overture, including a couple previously arranged for piano by his Society colleague H. Kopyt and another recently published in a violin-piano duo edition by Joseph Cherniavsky. Also a St. Petersburg Conservatory graduate, he had by this point built a successful career in the Yiddish theater in New York.

As this new edited score to Palestina makes evident, Zeitlin was a skilled and versatile composer. In this intriguing work, he has brought the new orchestral genre and style developed for cosmopolitan New York movie house audiences together with the techniques and goals of the short-lived but influential St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. Baker and Nelson are to be credited for bringing Zeitlin to our attention and making his music accessible to performers and researchers at a time when his name unfortunately remains relatively obscure.