Duet for Cello & Surf

The seats on which you will sit are in ruins. Your clothes are likely to be dirtied by dust...We are not responsible for injury caused to anyone attending the concert.

The warning on the invitations to a concert during Israel's first Music Festival was accurate--but discouraged no one. Armed with cushions and parasols, 1,200 Israelis pushed through two passageways into the ancient, open-air theater amid the ghostly remains of Caesarea, chief port of Rome's eastern colonies, built by Herod the Great ten years before the birth of Christ. Behind the orchestra pit lay cracked columns and stonework that bore witness to the far reach of the Roman Empire: pink granite from Egypt, creamy marble from Greece and Asia. The crumbling limestone seats, only recently excavated by Italian archaelogists, were liberally sprinkled with the dust of centuries.

But dust and debris were quickly forgotten when the festival's star performer strode onto the makeshift, wood-planked stage. Master Cellist Pablo Casals, a sprightly 84, brought concertgoers leaping from their rough-hewn seats in a rising ovation. The aging artist beamed. "Where did all those people come from?" he asked. They came from Haifa to the north, from kibbutzim in the shadow of Mount Carmel, from army headquarters in Tel Aviv--and they came chiefly to hear Pablo Casals.

Eternal Sounds. A plywood screen behind the orchestra only partially deflected Mediterranean breezes, and musicians were forced to clip their scores to their stands with wooden clothespins. Casals seemed unbothered; his back to the sea, he swung into Bach's Sonata in G. Performers who had been worried about the open theater's acoustics soon learned to forget their fears. The Romans had staged dramas, musical contests and water ballets at Caesarea, and the ancient impresarios knew their business. In the slow second movement, sustained, vibrant notes, clear and fragile as crystal, rippled to the topmost rows of the semicircular theater. Not a nuance was lost to the wind; it was as if Casals were playing in his own study.

Behind him, the surf broke with the flawless rhythm of a metronome, a whispering complement to the cellist's own compelling beat. "Now we are hearing two eternal sounds." marveled Violinist Isaac Stern, "the ocean surf and great music." A rapt audience enthusiastically agreed. Caesarea's centuries-old silence had been broken by beauty.

Change of Pace. Casals mesmerizing performance and an eerily effective rendition of Beethoven's Trio in D Major (the "Ghost" Trio) by Violinist Stern, Pianist Eugene Istomin and Cellist Leonard Rose were the high points of Israel's month-long festival. But there were other triumphs. Staged at seven sites from Haifa to the Revivim kibbutz, the festival drew 56,000 people to 23 concerts. In Tel Aviv, 500 music lovers who could not squeeze into the already-packed 3,000-seat Mann Auditorium were chased by police from a parapet outside the second floor. In Jerusalem, an opening-night crowd of 3,500 stood politely when Israeli President Izhak Ben-Zvi entered, then burst into thunderous applause for Casals. An astonishing total of 15,000 people flocked to five recitals in Tel Aviv to hear the internationally famed Budapest String Quartet pluck out all 16 Beethoven string quartets.

Still, the popular favorite was old Pablo Casals, the stubborn, spirited Spaniard who exiled himself when the Loyalists were defeated in 1939. And to delighted Israeli officials, nothing was more encouraging about the entire festival than the success of the one-shot performance at Caesarea. With a baited line out for tourists (some 4,000 from Europe and the U.S. attended this year's festival), they began charting plans to speed reconstruction of the long dead city, to refurbish the theater to accommodate 4,000, as it did in Roman times, and to center future festivals in Caesarea.

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