Shirley MacLaine, Harry Belafonte, Gigli, Joan Baez, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen . . . Jeffrey Geri saw them all.

                     Here are his ‘notes of nostalgia’

Leonard Cohen in the restored Roman Amphitheater, Caesarea. His classic songs, Suzanne, Madeleine, Dance Me to the End of Love and others against a backdrop of sea and star studded sky.  

Cavalleria Rusticana at Noga, the old Tel Aviv Opera House, performed by the then new Israel Opera Company with imported soloists, outstanding local chorus and dancers and a beautiful and evocative set. 

Harry Belafonte at the Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv soon after my wife Wendy and I immigrated to Israel from South Africa. It wasn’t only his superb performance that moved us, but the fact that we were there seeing and listening to him live, something that in South Africa at the time would have been impossible. A black Jamaican singer performing there in the early 60s was inconceivable. Listening to and seeing Harry Belafonte in Tel Aviv, we ex-South Africans suddenly felt in touch with the world. 

Nabucco in Caesarea. Va Pensiero, the song of the Jewish slaves in Babylonian exile, later became the anthem of Garibaldi’s Italian Freedom Movement. The desert background, moonlight and the dark-clad ensemble, combined with the soaring voices remain unforgettable. 

Rigoletto at the Budapest Opera Hall, made more intense by the thought that once, before the Holocaust, this historic venue would have been teeming with cultured and affluent Budapest Jewry. 

La Tosca, Barcelona - Strolling through the Gothic quarter looking for a place to have dinner, my wife and I suddenly heard the heroic strains of La Tosca wafting towards us through the alleys and over the rooftops. Following the sound we found ourselves in a lane between the Cathedral and the Cloisters, in which had gathered a large crowd. That night, and the next, we enjoyed outdoor operatic concerts under the sky. We sat on the cobblestones or on the steps of the Cloisters listening to arias sung by a squat fortyish liquid-voiced tenor - with stereophonic orchestral accompaniment - and an elderly retired opera chorus. Some of the audience had brought scores. Oneheavenly aria after another from operas by Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni and others. 

Drums in Seoul – A play in which the dialogue was articulated only through the drumming of kitchen utensils. Like the Scottish with their bagpipes, the Koreans have their drums expressing in beat and tempo the voice of pride and defiance of a much conquered nation. 

Beniamino Gigli in La Boheme at the City Hall in Johannesburg, singing “Your tiny hand is frozen”.  My first encounter with live opera as a youth. Gigli was getting on in years. The tenor was fat, the soprano was thin, just like a skeleton wrapped up in skin. But oh, the voices. 

Italian Opera Company - Waving goodbye to the visiting Italian Opera Company at the Cape Town docks. The entire company on deck, joining together in one great chorus, until their ship pulled away, leaving the crowd on the wharf transfixed as it slowly disappeared over the horizon. 

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, in London – The Black Mikado with an all black cast, exotic, witty and engaging. I saw it three times - with the high notes of the plump, slightly hoarse-voiced contralto unforgettably bubbling and gurgling through my mind like the rapids of a forest stream. 

Greek night club singer, in Rhodes. With  short, steel gray hair and a dark complexioned face carved out of rock, singing in a strong baritone, patriotic Greek songs  of freedom, courage, hope, love, loss and despair, transfixing and mesmerizing the Greek and foreign  audience. 

Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris. In a smoky night club in New York’s Greenwich Village. Sitting at small tables listening to three singers with rollicking voices sing the songs of Jacques Brel. My first trip to New York. I got drunk on those songs and have remained so ever since. 

Orchestral concerts at the Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv, at a time when we had subscription seats in the  front, not the best seats to enjoy the full sweep of the music, but the seats that made me feel engulfed by the music, with the conductor and front-line musicians a mere meter or two away. 

Daniel Barenboim & Jacqueline du Pre - A few days before the Six Day war broke out in front row seats, with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim with his wife, the late Jacqueline du Pre the soloist. With war pending and seemingly inevitable the feeling that we might never enjoy anything like it again, made the performance electric and indelible. 

Rock-operas by Andrew Lloyd Webber, in London: Jesus Christ Superstar (my Israeli kids wanting to know, who was this Jesus Christ), Cats and The Phantom of The Opera. 

Shirley MacLaine at a Royal Gala Performance at the London Palladium – the Queen’s birthday, I think, with Shirley MacLaine singing “If they could see me now” with such vitality and truth., Exhilarating! 

Les Miserables in London, again in the front row, feeling part of the ensemble and about to be led off to the guillotine at any moment. 

Mozart/Strauss concert in Vienna, performed by the Vienna Residence Chamber Orchestra at the beautiful Palais Auersperg, a baroque palace built in 1706. It was there that the young Mozart, at the age of six, allegedly jumped onto the lap of the Empress Maria Theresa. The orchestral pieces, polkas, marches, waltzes and short extracts from concertos and operas were light, cheerful and familiar to us since childhood. They were played, danced to and sung with jollity and charm. The orchestra, including five beautiful young women dressed in identical off-the-shoulder pink evening dresses, the operatic-attired tenor and soprano, and the two ballet dancers performed with perfection but at the same time all in a contagious spirit of fun. The aria singers were amazing and the tall slender blonde ballerina at times made us laugh out loud. During the Tic Tac Polka there was even some audience participation, with the participant being so funny we thought he must have been a professional posing as a member of the audience. 

Three Blind Mice, a children’s blues and jazz concert in Chicago with a superb group showing the development of the simple children’s song into a major syncopated work. 

Hava Nagila sung by a young aspiring Japanese blues singer at what was called “The Discovery Club” in San Francisco, where new talent was sometimes discovered. The young Japanese singer claimed to a slightly incredulous audience that the beautiful song was taught to her when she was a very young girl by her grandmother in their tiny village in Japan. 

The annual Opera Workshop in Tel Aviv, with Metropolitan Opera’s Joan Dornemann coaching aspiring young opera stars from all over the world how to project their latently beautiful voices. 

The Coca Cola theme song of the mid-80s in Atlanta, sung as a hymn by a fresh young girls' choir, converting the audience to Coke over Pepsi anytime. 

We shall overcome sung by Joan Baez at a crowded concert in Tel Aviv with the words having a special significance in this beleaguered country. 

The 1812 Overture accompanied by fireworks and canon shot, in the Yarkon Park Tel Aviv, performed by The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin. 

Popular Israeli singer Arik Lavi at a smoky nightclub in Old Jaffa, where he sang the innocent idealistic songs of pre and early Israel including "The Red Rock" banned on the radio because it enticed young Israelis, many of whom as a result disappeared, to steal across the border into Jordan to catch a glimpse of the red rock of Petra. 

Kol Nidre at an undenominational chapel at an American Army base recreation center in Seoul, Korea, with the local army Rabbi, a sweet voiced Chazan  flown over from Hong Kong, and congregants consisting of Jewish US soldiers, Koreans and their mixed marriage spouses, and Jewish expatriates, mostly working in Korea. 

Soccer dance lesson in 2010 pre-world cup South Africa.  Sipping coffee in Johannesburg's Mandela Square we noticed a stage with sound equipment had been laid out opposite us on the other side of the square. Four young black women clad in blue jeans and red football sweaters mounted a stage with sound equipment on the other side of the square and announced the commencement of a soccer dance lesson. The music started and the lesson began. Slowly the shoppers, tourists and others in the square joined in, repeating the steps in rhythmic unison until they formed about four or five long joyful multicolored chorus lines of moving feet, legs and arms. We watched enchanted, from time to time glancing at the huge statue of Nelson Mandela presiding over the happening, wishing South Africa well with its World Cup hosting endeavor. 

Three pure-voiced, ten year old little black boys, once called Piccaninies, future Pavarottis, with a hat brimming with coins on the pavement in front of them, singing Neopolitan love songs outside a sea-front  Italian restaurant in Hermanus on the Indian Ocean near Cape-Town where we had once spent our honeymoon. The pasta was al-dente but the music was O Solo Mio. 

Wedding in Mauritius. In the late afternoon we all strolled down to the chupah.  Billowing and white it stood on the golden beach with the sea and descending sun behind it, and facing it five rows of small white armchairs. The white of the chupah, the golden beach, the blue of the sea, the reddening horizon and the green of surrounding palms and lawn looked like the scene of a movie set. It was stunning. The rich sound of cantorial music filled the air. Strollers on the beach, sunbathers at the nearby pool and the hotel waiters stood at attention as captivated as the guests. 

Our first morning in Dubrovnik, passing the beautiful part-Gothic, part-Renaissance Cathedral, we entered the bright, sunlit interior and found ourselves in the middle of a service with the rich  sounds of a full choir  compelling us to linger and listen. We stood behind the congregants, transfixed. Wendy suggested I sit in the empty back row, but I declined. It would have turned me into another congregant. A bit much I thought. 

Our sons, now with families of their own, singing traditional Pesach songs at our Passover dinners, repeating the same melodies year after year, those they were taught at school and those we brought with us from South Africa, originally sung in Lithuania and perhaps before then in Spain, my father having claimed to be a descendent of Maimonides. 

We have been entranced at other concerts and operas, in concert halls, opera houses, churches and amphitheaters in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, London, San Francisco and New York, in the Judean Hills and on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. We have thrilled to the music of bagpipes on a misty hillside in Scotland and enjoyed street music in San Antonio, New Orleans, Cape Town, Prague, and Barcelona and in the market towns of Provence, but the musical events described above are the first to leap to my mind.