The Mandolin as Nomad. Roy Dayan and the Israel Camerata

Just before the war, Roy Dayan managed to play a series of concerts with the Israel Camerata—a musician’s musician, for whom the mandolin is not merely an instrument but a handcrafted artifact, a violin-inflected hybrid in a kind of “Kerman style.” Dayan himself is style squared, cubed: you watch him play and cannot look away; the eye, too, is held. One looks at him and recalls Hans Bellmer’s Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, his attempt to uncover the body of the image beneath the image of the body. In a sense, the same assembly model is at work here—a glass-bead game, a play in every sense, capitalized and not.

He performed Nedudim (“Wanderlings”), a concertante fantasia by the Israeli-born, Germany-based composer Gilad Hochman—a quintessential East–West axis. Here the mandolin sounded like a setar, reminding one of another ancestor, the oud. The music was seasoned with saffron, cardamom, clove, star anise; it breathed sandalwood and amber, musk and patchouli. The score appears to belong to the European tradition—and yet one hears maqam (call it mugham, makom, as you wish). That is the voice of the solo mandolin; the orchestra has its own narrative, as Hochman explained before the concert: the work is a passage through landscapes of memory.

Roy Dayan belongs to a rare breed: he can make an instrument of European genealogy suddenly recall its Eastern relatives. In truth, the mandolin and the setar are distant cousins. The setar, with its velvety, slightly nasal attack and its capacity for micro-intonation, lives within the mugham tradition, where melody unfurls like a carpet. Hochman’s Nedudim draws on modal turns, repeating ornamental figures, elongated melismatic lines—so that the mandolin sheds its European jacket and tries on an Eastern robe.

In maqam–mugham practice, it is not the theme as object that matters, but the state as process. Time flows differently there; and when Dayan allows himself rubato, his sound acquires that spicy, almost vocal phrasing. A phrase stretches, begins to coil around a note, circling it in a spiral. He plays—though “plays” hardly captures the sorcery, the quiet shamanism—ecstatically, reading the score as an inner ritual, an emotional code. And there is this: the mandolin can create the illusion of continuous sound. Tremolo becomes a sonic mirage; boundaries blur, and we find ourselves with one mandolin foot in the East, the other—an orchestral one—in the West. I have always loved such coincidences of cultural coordinates.

Hochman’s full title reads: Wanderlings (Nedudim). Fantasia-Concertante for Mandolin and String Orchestra. The duality is inscribed in the name itself: fantasia as flow, concertante as challenge, as dialogue with the orchestra. The Hebrew nedudim carries the semantics of wandering, displacement, vibrational movement—not merely travelers, but people for whom the ground beneath their feet is in motion.

Within an Israeli context, modality is often reimagined: repeating formulas, a gradual intensification of ecstasy, tremolo as pulsation—all of this in Dayan’s hands sounded like improvisation, even where the part was strictly notated. The orchestral ostinati created an almost trance-like environment. The strings built a space—level, symmetrical, architecturally lucid, each arch aware of its place. The mandolin answered with the dust of roads, the breath of encampments, the drawn-out intonation of a caravan. Dayan’s sound stretched, filled with air, trembled on the verge of disintegration. Tremolo ceased to be a technique and became a pulse—the pulse of wandering. The soloist expanded the sound to its limits, elongating it, thickening it, saturating it with micro-intervals; in the cadenza, a mugham horizon opened.

In this Fantasia-Concertante, matter itself seemed to split; civilizations brushed against one another. The orchestra as a collective European consciousness—structure, form, a dramatic arc. The mandolin as the voice of a traveler who refuses the comfort of belonging to a single cultural home, who lives at the crossroads. A shared pulse—and an individual, expanding modal breath. The mandolin as private consciousness within collective memory, as a nomad’s voice within the city’s architecture, as a desert passing through the concert hall. The orchestra receded into shadow, retaining the role of a desert landscape. The mandolin became narrator, shaman, wanderer—an instrument without settlement. And inevitably one thought of the composer’s national belonging: we are all, to some degree, in transit.

Then came a neatly proportioned European chapter. The orchestra played, with real finesse, Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 (“American”) and Brahms’s Serenade No. 2. Not without curiosities: the orchestral transcription of the Dvořák quartet was made by Nurhan Arman, an Armenian conductor from Istanbul, who added a double bass part; at moments the music even suggests the chirping of a scarlet tanager. In the Serenade, violins are absent—Brahms favors the winds this time. At the podium stood the excellent Yaniv Dinur—music director of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra in Florida and the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts, Israeli-born. A genuine discovery for me: I had not had the chance to hear him before.

Photos by © Lina Goncharsky