The following article is an overview of the career of Israeli guitarist, composer, arranger, and conductor Amir Frohlich. The main source of information is an interview with Mr Frohlich, conducted by Bas Tukker in May 2026. The article below is subdivided into two main parts; a general career overview (part 3) and a section dedicated to Amir Frohlich’s Eurovision involvement (part 4).
All material below: © Bas Tukker / 2026
Contents
- Passport
- Short Eurovision record
- Biography
- Eurovision Song Contest
- Other artists about Amir Frohlich
- Eurovision involvement year by year
- Sources & links
PASSPORT
Born: September 6th, 1955, Oradea (Romania)
Nationality: Romanian (1955-1961) / Israeli (1961-)
SHORT EUROVISION RECORD
Amir Frohlich (אמיר פרויליך) was the arranger and conductor of the Israeli entry in the 1993 Eurovision Song Contest in Millstreet. The song ‘Shiru’, composed by former festival conductor Shaike Paikov, was performed on the night by Lahakat Shiru – or in English: The Shiru Group – featuring Sarah’le Sharon.
BIOGRAPHY
Amir Frohlich was born in post-war Romania, more specifically in Oradea, a town situated close to the border with Hungary. “Actually, my mother tongue is Hungarian,” Amir explains. “The majority of people in Transylvania, the northwest of Romania, are Hungarian speakers. Both of my parents were Jewish. My father especially had suffered heavily in the war. He had just started studying pharmacy, when racial laws were introduced which forbade Jews to be at the academy. He made a tour across the concentration camps, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. My mother lived in the ghetto in Arad, and just three days before she was due to be transported to Auschwitz, Germany surrendered. Destiny worked in their favour; they both survived the Holocaust. After the war, the parents of a lot of my friends were suffering from post-traumatic syndromes, but somehow my mom and dad overcame what they had been through in good spirits My father was a lovely man, always full of jokes. I grew up in a warm and safe household. Lucky me!”
“After the war, my father became a lorry driver, working for a company which supplied veterinaries all over Romania. He was always on the road in the countryside, which was good for us, because this enabled him to trade with local farmers. There was always enough food in our basement! The musical gene was passed on to me by my mother, who worked as a music teacher in kindergartens. She played the accordion, and I also remember crawling under our in-house Bechstein piano as a child. She also played in a ballroom orchestra. Their big hit at the time was ‘Marina’ (Rocco Granata’s chart success from 1959 – BT). She often took me with her to performances… and, in fact, although I was very young, they occasionally let me sing with the orchestra. People apparently liked to listen to a little boy, whose mother had taught him to sing in tune!”
“When I was six years old, my parents decided to emigrate to Israel. One of their motivations was Zionism, which they had been taught in school, while on the other hand they were keen to escape the circumstances in Romania, which was a communist country. Authorities considered my grandfather a capitalist, because he owned two restaurants in Arad. It was simple; If you owned property, you were a capitalist. The Securitate (Romania’s dreaded secret service – BT) were always after him.”
“One time, my father was taken along for questioning by Securitate officers as well; and he came home with a black eye. You can understand why my family felt Romania was not the right place for them. Of course, an existence in Israel was a leap into the unknown, but my mother’s creed was, ‘Better to eat eggplant in Palestine than meat in Romania’. They were keen to close the door on this unfriendly country.”
“My grandparents came to Israel several months before us. Authorities allowed us to leave with four suitcases filled with 70 kilograms of our belongings, mainly clothes. They were happy to confiscate the rest of what we owned upon our departure; our gold, my mother’s necklace, everything. The first part of our journey was a flight to Vienna. There, people of the Jewish organisation from the USA who had arranged our emigration asked my father what his occupation was. When he told them he was a truck driver, they suggested coming to America instead. At the time, they were building Las Vegas. ‘There is plenty of work for you over there… don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ Dad was actually quite open to that prospect, but my mother wanted nothing of it. She told him about the eggplant in Palestine! Of course, she also wanted to join her parents in Israel – and so to Israel we went. From Vienna, we left for Venice, where we boarded a steamer which took us to Haifa.”
Amir as a toddler with his parents on the bridge over the Crișul Repede River in Oradea, Romania (1959)
“The Sochnut, the agency which took care of immigrants coming to Israel, took us to a small village in the Galilee, in the north of Israel. When my parents stepped down from the bus, they said, ‘We’re not staying here.’ With the little pocket money they had received upon arrival in Haifa, we travelled to Tel Aviv, where an aunt of ours lived. Shortly after that, we moved to Netanya with its large Hungarian community. In the first year, my parents had a hard time making ends meet. My father struggled badly with the language, but he found work as a taxi driver, while my mom took up a job as a music teacher again. They were happy in Israel, working hard for themselves and for me, their only child. They gave me a youth which I can only be thankful for.”
“Like my parents, I experienced a cultural shock when arriving in Israel. For a start, I didn’t know the language – and my clothes were a little different to what the Israeli kids were wearing, but I’ve always been good at relating to people. It didn’t take me long to find friends. I picked up the Hebrew language in about a month. Where my ears are concerned, I’m a language person. However, I discovered early on that writing was a completely different matter. In high school, I was the best English speaker in my class, but I barely managed a sufficient mark when writing an essay. As it turned out much later, I had a very high degree of dyslexia! This is a condition that has been with me throughout my life – and which to a certain degree also determined my career.”
“Given that I showed an interest in the accordion and the piano, my mother taught me to read music, which was a challenge as you can imagine, but I managed! From the beginning, my approach has always been to study the score really hard, learn it by heart, and then close the book. When I was ten years old, I heard The Beatles on the radio. I set my mind on becoming Paul McCartney, which didn’t really work out, but at least I tried! I wanted to learn to play the guitar, which my mother wasn’t too happy about, but I had my way. She found me a guitar teacher, realising that it was better not to teach your own son.”
“My first teacher was a man called Odner Serri. He taught me the basics, playing harmonies and things like that. Afterwards, there was another guy, a jazz player, who focused on improving my technique with music by Wes Montgomery, but also by turning my attention to virtuoso pieces like ‘Tico-tico’, for which you have to be able to play really fast. I even tried my hand at the Concerto de Aranjuez, but that was a little later.”
“As a teenager, I got together with friends to form little pop groups here in Netanya. When we heard a song on the radio, we sat together to work out a cover version, each trying to master our own part. There were no rules, no arrangements, we were just playing. Beatles songs, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and also ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’ – essentially anything which we liked. I also found the music of Aphrodite’s Child immensely inspirational. I later learned that the mastermind of the band was Vangelis, a genius when it came to instrumentation. The sound he managed to create for a song like ‘It’s Five O’Clock’ was really great. It was a sound that was fresh and new. Sometimes I reflected on how wonderful it would be to create music in this way myself, but I didn’t have any idea about how to go about it.”
Amir (third from right) in the mid-1970s as a member of the Israeli Air Force Entertainment Group
“Do you know how I discovered that I was perhaps talented at composing? In high school, I obviously had to study literature. There were lots of poems which I liked, but my dyslexia got in the way again – how could I learn them properly for my exams? The answer was that I invented melodies for them, allowing me to sing them as songs. In a way, the dyslexia helped me to discover my talent in this field. When something paralyses you, there is a different force inside of you which makes up for this, making you stronger! This was a key moment in my life. I showed the music I had written to my teachers, who were enthusiastic, encouraging me to explore further down this path. There were other subjects in school which I loved, especially history, but moments like this showed me that the music gene in me was stronger than anything else”
“The call-up to perform my military service came early in 1974, right after the Yom Kippur War. The country was in turmoil after the war, and actually being in the army meant that you were more or less protected from the discussions which were going on in the outside world. I auditioned to join one of the army entertainment groups as a guitarist. After I had passed a whole series of auditions, I was chosen to join the Air Force Entertainment Group. This was a huge step. The army music groups were the main source of popular music in Israel at the time. A lot of future stars went through these groups before becoming famous; guys like Shlomo Artzi, Matti Caspi, Yoni Rechter, and the others from Kaveret (who represented Israel in Eurovision 1974 as Poogy with Yoni Rechter as their conductor – BT). All of them were youngsters who were extremely motivated. The singer in my band was Danni Bassan – an excellent vocalist who later joined a band called T-Slam, which was one of the biggest acts in Israel until the early 1980s. In short, being in one of the army music groups meant being surrounded by a lot of talent.”
“At that time, the main producer of the army groups was Yair Rosenblum. He was there in the right place at the right time. On the one hand, he was a father figure, willing to give young musicians the opportunity to have a good grounding in music. In doing so, he really improved the level of popular music in this country. There were plenty of promising boys and girls in the army groups, happy to work day and night to get better. On top of that, Rosenblum wrote excellent songs. He managed to create a very nice arsenal of Israeli songs, brought to fame by the army groups. They were in the charts all the time, helped by the fact that Yair always had good vocalists at his disposal to record his new material. It was a fruitful partnership.”
“Whenever Mr Rosenblum had a new song, he organised a rehearsal, which started with him playing the tune for us on the piano. The first time I was in such a rehearsal, he asked, ‘Who thinks he can manage to play it after me?’ I stepped up and played the tune on the guitar. When he liked what he heard, he asked me if I had any ideas about what to do with the different instruments. I gave him one or two suggestions – and then he just said, ‘Alright, then do that for me!’ My starting point was the bassline, crucial in any pop song. The other instruments followed and I also did a vocal arrangement. I had never been appointed leader of the band in a formal way, but we all knew it was important to work together to get it right, because Mr Rosenblum would come back to listen to our work next time around. Discipline was required!”
“Everything went well, and over time I took care of most of the arrangements for our group. ‘Amir, over there I want those vocal lines and there I want this instrumental solo,’ those were the things Mr Rosenblum used to say to me… and so dutiful Amir became his arranger, changing the harmonies and considering how best to tackle the vocals. You could say I became Rosenblum’s assistant, or slave if you like, because he was clever enough to give away the arranging job to others. This gave him time to focus on other things. At the same time, he always put trust in me. He never came back telling me that he had better ideas.”
Amir (on the right) as a twenty-year-old with two of his fellow members of the Israeli Air Force Band, Rachel Schein and Danni Bassan. Schein later became a successful actress and stage writer, while Danni Bassan would go on to win fame as lead singer of Israeli rock group T-Slam
“I wasn’t the only one he allowed to discover his talents in this way. He did the same with Yoni Rechter, Dani Sanderson, Matti Caspi, and all the others. In doing what he did, Yair Rosenblum gave me a huge boost of confidence. Unconsciously, I already had the eagerness in me to write and arrange music when I was a high school student. I had dreamt about this. In the army group, I discovered that I actually had it in me to do this and, even better, that people liked what I came up with.”
“Looking back, my three years in the army were among the nicest periods in my life. We travelled all over the country to perform for our fellow soldiers. You are with a group of twelve to fifteen people. In the morning, you pack up all of the equipment and get into a coach. Away you go, travelling for five hours or so to some outpost in the countryside. The area we covered was extensive, from the Golan Heights in the north to the furthest corners of the Sinai Desert in the southwest. Upon arrival, you would build up the stage and do your performance. Sometimes, we didn’t know where we would sleep that night – perhaps on the bus, perhaps in tents? For a youngster, all of this was exhilarating and very formative. As you can imagine, in such circumstances, strong bonds are formed. I’ve remained in touch with many of my fellow band members from the army days until the present day, which tells you something, as our time together was more than fifty years ago. We are all grandfathers now!”
“After coming out of the army in 1977, I went back to Netanya. I had decided I wanted to try to get into the Tel Aviv University as a student of composition and orchestral conducting. I felt I wasn’t good enough as a guitarist to make a career in that field. Moreover, I felt that the big picture – the band, the orchestra – was my instrument. Being an excellent guitarist didn’t give me 100% satisfaction. In preparation for the academy, I continued taking private lessons while taking on little jobs here and there as a freelance musician to make a living.”
“As a guitarist, I played in several groups at the time. One of them was a Yemeni band from Tel Aviv with a very young lead singer called Ofra Haza. She wasn’t older than eighteen or nineteen at the time. Israel is a melting pot of immigrants from all over the world and the musical flavours reflect that. This band made the connection between Israeli and Yemeni music. That was before Ofra’s breakthrough. Nobody knew her yet.”
“On the back of what I had done in the army and some connections I had built up during those years, I also became one of a pool of arrangers who worked for Kol Israel, our national radio station, along with other youngsters; guys like Kobi Oshrat, Nansi Brandes, and Eldad Shrem. There was plenty of work, as the radio broadcasted lots of shows which featured live music. Furthermore, Kol Israel organised different song festivals; there was the Chassidic Song Festival and the Oriental Song Festival, both of which were held annually with an orchestra accompanying all entrants. This was a great opportunity for me to try my hand at orchestral arrangements.”
Ofra Haza’s 1980 solo album was given the name of her major hit, penned by Amir Frohlich, ‘Al ahavot shelanu’
“There were jobs in Netanya as well; wedding parties and things like that, but also bigger events. I was commissioned to be the producer of a local children’s festival organised during Hanukkah. In fact, it was such an ambitious project that I needed help – and I found a very young guy, Gadi Goldman (conductor for Israel at Eurovision 1995 – BT). He was just a teenager at the time. It was nice to get him on board, because he turned out to be a really nice guy. It took me less than five minutes to see that he was very talented. We’ve been friends ever since.”
“By the time I entered the music academy of Tel Aviv University in 1979, I had already been studying privately with Yitzhak Sadai, a lovely man who was a great mentor. He introduced me to classical music. I continued my lessons with him even after getting into university, where I got to study under another great professor, Nachum Amir, a genius who could play Wagner by heart. I never had in mind to be a classical musician, but in my time there was no Rimon Institute yet, the Israeli version of Berklee College which was founded in the mid-1980s. But I don’t regret studying music the classical way. My goal was to be a Renaissance man, an all-round professional musician, able to work in all corners of the music world.”
“Without comparing my abilities to his, my idol was Leonard Bernstein. He could do everything, from conducting classical symphonies to writing musicals, and he was great at both. Realistically speaking, I looked up to a guy like Kobi Oshrat, a great guy who is a little older than me. On the one hand, Kobi writes and composes excellently, but he also knew how to arrange and conduct his own music. To me, being a conductor was never about glory; no, it’s a profession, and in order to be a good arranger and conductor, you need to have the proper background. As simple as that.”
“Knowing what I know now, I understand better than at the time why the academy proved such a challenge. Studying the conductor’s score of Beethoven’s Fifth as a dyslexic was not an easy matter. As I told you, when reading scores, my approach had always been to learn them by heart which I tried at the academy as well, following the example of Toscanini, whose sight was so bad that he had to conduct his work purely working on memory. But who am I? Only Amir Frohlich from Netanya. Who am I to aspire to conduct Mozart? This is the reality and I’m too intelligent a person to allow myself to get frustrated by things that I cannot influence. If you have a gimpy leg, you cannot learn how to dance properly, and it’s the same with me; I’ll never be able to read scores like a newspaper. Yitzhak Sadai gave me the excellent advice to go to the music library and listen to recordings of the great classical works. After ten, twelve hours of listening I got to the bottom of a piece and what’s more, I learnt to enjoy, love, and get excited about the works of Ravel, Bach, Couperin, Fauré, and so many others. I got my theoretical knowledge thanks to hard work and the guidance of Sadai and Nachum Amir.”
“Meanwhile, while studying in Tel Aviv, I was still playing the guitar with the Yemeni group, when Ofra Haza broke away from the others to start a solo career, and I understood why she did it. She wasn’t just a great singer with a crystal-clear voice full of desire, but she had the eagerness and willpower to reach the top of the world. In this she was helped by her manager, Bezalel Aloni. After the break-up, Ofra and Bezalel asked me to write a song. That first composition was ‘Ahava beta’agunim’, which they liked enough to put on her first solo album.”
Amir (second from left) in the recording studio in 1989 for a recording session of Shaike Paikov’s musical We Are Netanya, for which he wrote the arrangements; the others, from left, are composer Shaike Paikov himself, Netanya’s mayor Yoel Elroi, and director Pini Heller
“My work with the Yemeni band had ended, but Ofra and Bezalel continued to call upon me to write songs now and again in the following years. In 1980, Ofra took part in the Kdam, the festival organised to determine the Israeli Eurovision entry (although the Israeli broadcasting service decided to withdraw from the international contest when news transpired that it was due to be held on Remembrance Day, the Kdam competition went through as planned – BT). One day, Bezalel Aloni brought new lyrics asking me to add music to them. When I read through the words, they struck me as rather poetic. ‘About our love, our disappointments, our jealousies – I’m floating like a butterfly that sings his life in one single day.’ Sitting down at the piano, I found the hook quite rapidly. It more or less flowed from my fingers.”
“Basically, I used the same approach as in my high school days, allowing myself to be inspired by poetry and putting music to my favourite poems simply by following the words. Of course I was also thinking about Ofra’s vocal range. I knew what she could handle. The arrangement was done by Eldad Shrem, because I was busy with another project at the time. Then Ofra came in and turned it into a masterpiece. We didn’t win, but the song, ‘Ai ahavot shlanu’, was a top hit in the Israeli charts.”
“Later that same year, another of my songs, recorded by Ofra, also sold well as a single, ‘Shir ahava lachayal’. In all, over the span of four years, I wrote about eight songs for her, two of which were huge hits. Being in first place in the hit parade in Israel is great – New York would have been better, but Israel is ok as well! I wasn’t involved in her Eurovision song later on (‘Hi’ in 1983 – BT). The last song I composed for her was on the album which was released off the back of her Eurovision success. Her manager decided he wanted to work with other songwriters, which is fair enough. After all, Einstein used to say, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ She had to develop artistically, which she did with great songwriters like Thomas Dolby.”
“Eight years later, Bezalel Aloni called me again asking for a song in the style of ‘Shir ahava lachayal’, but the inspiration didn’t come. I tried, I tried really hard, but it didn’t work out. Mousa wasn’t there for me apparently. Rather than regretting that our partnership had ended, I prefer to think that I was lucky to write those eight songs for Ofra. She was a very nice person, someone who you could talk to eye to eye, as we say in Israel. The success didn’t change her personality. She remained as approachable, modest, and friendly as always.”
“I was so sorry when I heard she had passed away. People are complicated creatures. On the one hand, they can be very successful in their careers, like Ofra, but she didn’t have the common sense to go to a doctor when she contracted AIDS. She was too afraid of what her mother would say. So in actual fact, Ofra didn’t die from AIDS, she died from feeling ashamed. It’s a really sad story, but artistically she was really kissed by the gods. No doubt Ofra Haza is the best singer I’ve ever worked with.”
Amir’s first solo album, Ernst – A Cab Driver’s Story, released in 1996
“By the time I stopped working with Ofra, I had already left the music academy. I completed three of the four years. The thing was, due to my dyslexia, I was failing at the obligatory English exams all the time. Establishment and rules got in the way! During that third year, one of my teachers, who knew how hard a time I had as a student, told me, ‘Do yourself a favour; when you get out of this institute, forget all you learned and start to enjoy music again!’ I’ve committed to those last words of his for the rest of my life! Of course I picked up a lot of knowledge in those three years at the academy. Given that I worked in the entertainment business, I couldn’t put all of it into practice, but it certainly helped me in reaching my goal of becoming an all-round musician. I hardly knew anything about classical music and its history before going to university. Having this background is a joy for life. To this day, whenever I feel like relaxing, I love listening to the great classical composers.”
“After parting ways with Ofra Haza, I diversified my lines of work even further. I continued writing orchestrations for programmes in radio and television which included a live band or an orchestra. Apart from that, I also got to compose the musical accompaniment to radio theatre, a genre which has become extinct nowadays. In the 1980s, Israeli radio regularly aired plays, which were done as an audio version with musical accompaniment. There was no large orchestra available; I usually only worked with a rhythm section. A notable play for which I wrote the music is Solon in Lydia, an old piece by Theodor Herzl, the spiritual father of the State of Israel. As the play revolves around the legendary meeting between King Croesus and the Athenian lawgiver Solon, the director was looking for a Greek atmosphere within the music. That’s why I wrote charts which included bouzoukis. Later on, I often recorded such radio theatre soundtracks alone on a synthesiser.”
“Other than that, I continued working in pop music, teaming up with an excellent singer called Riki Manor, for whom I wrote many songs, but also working on music in the Chassidic genre, something which I’m not particularly proud of. The 1980s were a time when there was plenty of work for record arrangers. Sometimes a good colleague of mine, Nansi Brandes, asked me to come and take over part of his work, because he had too much on his shoulders and needed somebody to share the burden with. Nansi was also born in Romania – in fact, I would say he is the representative of Romania in Israel, because he was raised with Romanian as his first language, unlike me. Nansi and I have always been good colleagues.”
“Another type of work I found was with advertisement companies, who were looking for jingles for their commercials in radio and television. Kobi Oshrat and Eldad Shrem were the main jingle writers in Israel at the time, but there was so much work in this field that firms were always on the lookout for new guys. In fact, Eldad was so overburdened at times, that he asked me to share the workload with him, just as Nansi did with his studio arrangements. I soon found out that writing jingles is in my fingers. It’s like writing a haiku, but in a commercial way – you have to create the essence of a song in the space of half a minute. It has to be tight, but where others found this hard work, I came up which such melodies in a matter of minutes. Sometimes, while reading the script for a commercial, a tune would already have popped up in my head.”
“The arranging work for these jingles was easy; just a rhythm section, perhaps with an additional saxophone to spice it up a little, and later of course the synthesiser and computers were helpful tools. Perhaps I make it sound too easy, because this was serious work, and you had to make sure to approach it professionally. Having said that, these kind of productions were extremely profitable.”
Performing with a local choir in the village of Chorazim, Northern Israel (March 2018)
“Alongside my recording work, I also played the piano at the nightclub of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv for quite some years. One day, I was playing in the bar, and I suddenly noticed two world-famous classical pianists at the bar, Daniel Barenboim and Murray Perahia. They were having a drink after having done a concert with the Israel Philharmonic at the Mann Auditorium. Now, I can assure you, it is hard to avoid an inferiority complex when you are playing the piano with two such giants in the room. I was hugely intimidated. Somehow, Barenboim must have noticed, because he approached me during a break and he said, ‘Don’t worry, you just do your job; I’m not checking if you’re making any mistakes.’ It was nice that this great musician, one of the greatest if you ask me, went to the trouble of putting me at ease in this situation. This was the only time in my professional life when I felt my hands shivering!”
“When thinking back to the 1980s, it’s hard to determine a chronology of everything I did… Apart from the things I already mentioned I performed at weddings, while also slowly starting to work with choirs. In Israel, a musician cannot afford to specialise in just one thing. There’s nobody from my generation who just wrote jingles or composed pop songs. Even Kobi Oshrat did both, while also working as an arranger for other producers. You have to be versatile, you have to know how to be a Renaissance guy, and do everything you do with intelligence and love. I’ve never felt above doing any kind of job in music and, thank God, I’ve always managed to make a good living.”
“A very important person I met in 1989 was Shaike Paikov. That year, the city of Netanya celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its foundation. In typical Netanya fashion, with an outlook that is pretty provincial, the organising committee wanted to bring a big songwriter to write songs about how great our little town was. They had hired me to do the arrangements. The composer they brought in was Shaike. He was one of the most successful composers and producers our country had. He wrote some new songs, for which I created playbacks. The show was done like a musical, with performances reflecting on the development of Netanya from the 1920s to the present day. Shaike was very complimentary of my arrangements and we became friends. In the following years, I continued writing arrangements for him, whenever he called on me to help with certain projects he was working on. This partnership lasted well into the 1990s.”
“By the mid-1990s, having lived in a kibbutz for some years, I had moved back to Netanya, where I had a small recording studio built into my house. Having all the equipment at my disposal, I decided it was time to release a solo album. I just wanted to see what I could accomplish independently, without a producer being in the lead. Because I had worked as an arranger with singers so extensively, I now wanted to try writing instrumental pieces – just the music on its own. This really was about finding my own way as a musician, going places where nobody had ventured before. I dedicated the first album to my father, who had passed away some time before. That’s why it bears his name, Ernst – A Cab Driver’s Story. One of the pieces is actually a reworked version of a melody I wrote some years previously for the radio version of Solon in Lydia. The CD was released commercially in 1996 and on the back of my relative fame at the time, it actually attained quite some airplay on the radio.”
“Later on, I did two more albums, Chapter II and Flutes. The latter was done with a talented flautist called Heftsiba. She approached me after having heard some of my instrumental work, wondering if I would be interested in working with her. I had my doubts, but eventually the inspiration came and I wrote her ten pieces in an epic, classical style, inspired by the works of Karl Jenkins and Hans Zimmer. It was wonderful to have such a good instrumentalist playing my compositions. It was the first time I did a project focused on one instrument. This meant I had to work within a certain frame. On the other hand, given that Heftsiba had the talent to play everything, I had all the freedom in the world. I recorded everything in my own studio, working with synthesisers, but imitating a real orchestra. I worked with Heftsiba for about two years, until she fell victim to an incurable disease and passed away. Good people die too soon, you know. She really was an excellent musician.”
Amir backstage with poet Yoram Tahar-Lev (left) and singer and vocal coach Dalit Cahana (July 2018)
“I’m very proud of these three solo albums. They are my children and I love all three of them. I know I’m not Johann Sebastian Bach, but what made me perhaps semi-satisfied was when some friends of mine who teach music at academies here in Israel told me they included my albums in the music libraries of their schools. They felt these albums deserved to be there for students to listen to, which is a compliment. Moreover, all three of them are now on YouTube; maybe they will catch on somewhere. Instrumental music is international, not connected to lyrics or a certain language. These pieces are just nice melodies, which can be played in any style. Who knows, perhaps one hundred, two hundred years from now, someone will pick up my music and perform it, whether it be as a soloist, in symphonic style, or with a jazz band.”
“After taking part in Eurovision as a conductor in 1993, which to me was the highlight of my career as a musician, I asked myself, ‘Now what?’. Popular music was changing at the time, becoming more mechanical and shallow. It was clear that songs which hit the charts were progressively written from a different point of view, which did not interest me. I felt I just had to accept that I was no longer contemporary, especially since budgets were decreasing.”
“When Shaike Paikov allowed his work tempo to slow down, I decided that the answer to the question I had put myself was that I wanted to pass my love for music on to amateurs, working with vocal groups. I had already started conducting amateur choirs in the 1980s but even before that, in my army entertainment group, we were singing harmonies mostly arranged by me. I had become a professional in working with voices. So what did I do? I allowed myself to be hired by a school to close off the year with students singing songs, or by a group of people in a kibbutz preparing a performance. In short, I had taught myself how to get the best possible results when working with amateurs.”
“In the last twenty years, I’ve usually had four or five choirs to conduct. With each of them, I do one rehearsal every week. We’re singing contemporary music. Most of the concerts are during the summer period, with the winter months being taken up mostly by learning new pieces. Doing a rehearsal with a choir is like being an educator, going to school and teaching your subject. Sometimes this requires patience, something I didn’t have when I was younger. Perhaps it’s a quality I acquired simply by ageing. It’s a profession without much glamour, but I guess I like that. The satisfaction comes from introducing the singers to a new arrangement that I’ve prepared for them, working on it, and noticing at the end of the evening that the sound is actually already pretty good. To me, such rehearsals are uplifting experiences.”
“Added to that, I love making the people I work with happy. I’m quite a friendly guy, who is good at relating to people, making jokes without trying to force myself onto others. Only when it comes to music do I become a little tough. The conductor is the boss. I refer to my approach as democratic absolutism. Everybody is allowed to speak out democratically, but in the end I make the decisions! After all, I know what I want my arrangements to sound like. When I have the opportunity, I perform some tracks from my own albums with my choirs. I wrote vocal parts for most of these pieces. Sometimes a professional choir comes along, which allows me to make the level of the material a bit higher.”
Fully focused on his keyboard, March 2019
“Related to my work with choirs, but just a little different, are outdoor performances with large crowds. In Israel, people love organising get-togethers to sing popular songs. The words of each song are projected onto a screen and somebody playing the piano is guiding the audiences to sing along. Sometimes, they sing well, other times not so much. In the latter case, I just close my ears and put on a smile. If it makes people happy, I’m happy too. Because I love to tell stories, I usually intertwine the singalongs with anecdotes about popular songs with which I was involved, whether because they were first performed by my army group because I composed them, or had written the arrangement. It gives me pleasure to share my experiences and my gift for music with other people, in whichever way possible.”
“I don’t know if I’m satisfied with the career I’ve had. It’s always the simple questions which are the hardest to answer! If it hadn’t been for my dyslexia, maybe I could have progressed a little further in classical music or in jazz, but honestly speaking I’ve let go of all jealousies that I may have had. When I watch a classical concert on television and I really get into it, I stand up from my couch and conduct the music. That’s enough for me. I enjoy classical music a lot, something I have learnt thanks to the time I spent at the academy. Ravel, Bach, Mozart… with my humble talent I never felt like competing with these giants. One dream which I haven’t yet fulfilled is writing a musical. I have huge admiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I went to The West End twice to see his Phantom of the Opera and I’m go to London regularly to watch musicals.”
“But the main thing is that everything in life should be proportional. Many years ago, I was working with a choir from the Dead Sea region. Over there, I wanted to show that I was a tough musician, so I gave the choir a rehearsal which was very difficult. After the rehearsal was over, someone approached me who turned out to be a doctor in chemistry. He said, ‘Amir, relax, it’s only la-la-la’.”
“This was an important lesson. Many people in Israel forget to slow down. This is a mad country, you know. It feels like being in a food processor all the time. Life is chaotic. In such a situation, proportion is everything. I don’t want to suffer from a big ego. I’m not a loser, but I don’t want to be at war with myself either. So instead of feeling frustrated about never having conducted a symphony, I enjoy the things which I can do; working with choirs, going on stage with them, having a good time. When I took the decision to be a professional musician, I essentially went on pension; I mean, pensioners can choose to only do the things they enjoy doing, and I enjoy music so I never go to work. I’m enjoying myself, every day, and what’s more I’m even getting paid for it. Thank God, what a life!”
“After the 7th of October (in 2023 – BT), war broke out and normal life in Israel practically came to a standstill for quite some time. Big artists like Eyyal Golan and Shlomo Artzi saw their concerts getting cancelled. I thought my choirs would prefer to stop rehearsing as well, but the opposite was true; they were looking forward to two hours of feeling normal, without the worries of what our daily life had come to. So as long as I’m able to write arrangements and drive a car, I will do what I like best and make music. I’m seventy years old now and I want to enjoy life for as long as I can, looking for new experiences in music, but also beyond; learning about history and science, having good conversations with interesting people, and enjoying a cigar and good food. To my mind, those are the things which make life stand out from common existence.”
Rehearsing with the Yuvalim Choir in Pardesiya (2023)
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
Amir Frohlich was the arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of ‘Shiru’, the song that represented Israel for Eurovision 1993 in Millstreet. The composition by former Eurovision conductor Shaike Paikov was performed by Lahakat Shiru, i.e. The Shiru Group, a group of six vocalists, the most famous of which by far in Israel was Sarah’le Sharon, a music teacher who had won nationwide fame as the director of the Emek Hayarden Singing Club. Under her leadership, public singalongs were held, with the repertoire consisting of patriotic songs. In the 1980s, these performances were broadcast by Israeli television. It wasn’t just the programme which made Sharon popular, but also a record she released with the Emek Hayarden choir.
“It was Sarah’le’s idea to take part in the Kdam, our Eurovision selection show here in Israel, with a song connected to the singalong performances which had made her so popular,” Amir Frohlich recalls. “She had established the genre, playing the chords on the piano herself and people singing along without harmonies, without arrangements; just singing because they felt like singing. She thought it was a nice idea to create a song around this theme. So she asked Yoram Tahar-Lev, who lived in the same kibbutz as her, to write lyrics along those lines. ‘Shiru’ simply means ‘sing’, and the lyrics are about growing up in Israel which is a country of song, and how you shouldn’t wait for tomorrow to sing out loud because a song is all we have. Then she took Yoram’s lyrics to Shaike, and Shaike, being the excellent songwriter that he was, wrote the music as only he could.”
“Shaike was always a composer who wrote songs with ease. The melodies fell from his fingers, so to speak and ‘Shiru’ was no exception. By the time this Eurovision project came along, I had been working with Shaike for several years. I had first teamed up with him in 1989, when there was an event celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Netanya. Shaike had been invited by municipal authorities to write a set of songs to mark the occasion and I was the local guy who was commissioned to create the playbacks. Shaike was very complimentary of my arrangements and we became friends, even though he was much older. There was an age gap of nearly twenty years between us.”
“In the following years, I continued writing arrangements for him whenever he called on my help for certain projects he was working on. Shaike usually didn’t have the time to write arrangements to his own songs, which is why he worked with different arrangers to take over that part of the job for him. I didn’t just do studio work for him, but also scores which were used for television shows. Our partnership was actually pretty tight, because I got on better with him on a personal level than certain others did. For me, Shaike was absolutely tremendous; an open-minded musician who gave me carte blanche each time he asked me to write an arrangement for him.”
“I don’t know if Shaike or I came up with the idea of forming a group around Sarah’le. It might have been an idea from both of us, because we knew that she didn’t have the vocal abilities to carry the weight of a song on her own. So we said to each other, ‘Let’s form a group of singers around her’ which is what we did. First, there was Benny Nadler and his then wife Racheli Haim. Benny is a guy about my age, who is also from Netanya. We were pals from the time we were seventeen. Netanya was a small town; everybody who had a talent in music knew one another. Independently from Benny, I had already worked with Racheli, because she had been in one of the Israeli army entertainment groups for which I wrote arrangements.”
The Belgian single release of ‘Shiru’ in its English version, ‘Sing A Song’
“Our third performer was Guy Brakha. He was very young – in fact he had just come out of the army. I had never worked with him, but someone recommended him to me. As it turned out he was a great choice because he was a very good singer and performer. The fourth singer in our group was Julia Proiter. Coming from Russia, Julia had only moved to Israel a year or so previously. I got to know her through her husband, who was a musician I called upon regularly to perform in live gigs. I didn’t only work with Julia in Eurovision; I also picked her to do the vocals on my first solo album Ernst – A Cab Driver’s Story, which was not so long after the contest. She was a fantastic girl, a really great singer, one of the best I worked with.”
“Added to the four singers in the vocal group and Sarah’le herself, we had a sixth vocalist, a girl called Varda Zamir. I recall that she was from Eilat. Probably she was someone from Shaike’s orbit, because I had never heard of her before. She was brought in to sing the exact lines of Sarah’le, word for word. We wanted a back-up for Sarah’le, to avoid people noticing how strong her vocals were, if you know what I mean! I’m not sure if Sarah’le Sharon was aware herself that she wasn’t the best singer – probably not. In Israel we say, ‘No camel can see the humps on his back.’ That’s my answer to your question. On the other hand she was a very successful pianist and performer and you know how pop music works; you cannot argue with the taste of the audience. She deserved the success she had.”
“Shaike asked me to do the instrumentation and the vocal arrangement for the studio version of the song, which we recorded in preparation for the Kdam performance. Putting together the vocals was actually quite a challenge, because there was such a difference in range between Sarah’le and the others, but I like to think I came up with a workable solution. When Shaike claims (in the interview this website did with him in 2012 – BT) that he and I wrote the arrangement together, I’m not going to argue about that. After all, he was the songwriter and producer. From his point of view, it’s quite true that he came up with some ideas which I included in the arrangement, but I was the one who took the pencil and put the notes on a music sheet. In a way, Shaike was like the chef of an elegant restaurant. His assistant prepares a dish and then he tastes it before it leaves the kitchen; he likes it, but adds two grams of salt and then he claims it’s his creation. No doubt, Shaike gave me lots of inspiration when I wrote the arrangement. I repeat, he was a great guy.”
“Now, you have to know that Shaike and I never believed we would win the Kdam. In fact, the first place came as a shock. There were big stars taking part; David D’Or, Svika Pick, and Doron Mazar. It was amazing that we won in this strong field. I cannot name the reasons why it won one by one, cutting them into pieces academically. Sarah’le’s popularity with Israeli audiences must have played a part, although I also believe the energy in the vocal group was just great. At that point, there was a good vibe. As for the song, I actually don’t know if I liked it. You know, when you work on a piece of music so extensively, it becomes very hard to judge it yourself. I got used to it, that’s all I can say. It’s hard to claim that it’s as good as ‘Hallelujah’, but there was nothing wrong with it. Compared to, let’s say, ‘Ze rak sport’ (Israel’s entry of the previous year, composed by Kobi Oshrat for Dafna Dekel – BT), it’s not lousier or less lousy. It is what it is, a melody and a professionally written song which was right for its time.”
“I distinctly remember the moment we won the Kdam. I was backstage and Nansi Brandes approached me. Nansi was the arranger of Doron Mazar, who had finished as runner-up. ‘Amir, take this piece of advice from me; if you want to conduct the song in Eurovision, go to Shaike and demand from him to draw up a contract, in which he verbally states that you’re going to be the conductor. Otherwise, I can assure you that he’ll trick you out of it.’ I knew that Nansi had had a quarrel with Shaike. He had written the initial arrangement to Shaike’s previous Eurovision song (‘Derech ha-melech’ in 1989 – BT), but then Shaike had adapted the score a little bit, insisting on conducting it himself in the international final, which he did. I told Nansi that I didn’t need a contract to be the conductor. He then repeated what he just said, only more vehemently, but I just said, ‘Nansi, no! You are you and I am I.’”
Part of the Israeli delegation in Millstreet, from left: Amir Frohlich, the Irish hostess assigned to the contestants from Israel, the wife of lyricist Yoram Tahar-Lev, performer Rachel Haim, a director of Israeli television called Yaakov Asal, composer Shaike Paikov, another Israeli television official, and performers Guy Brakha and Varda Zamir
“Nansi had his point of view. In terms of personality, he and Shaike had always been oil and water. They had had their disagreements in the past, whereas I have always gotten on excellently with Shaike. When we got back into the studio to prepare the Eurovision project, I just asked Shaike, ‘If I write the score for the orchestra in the contest, will you let me conduct it?’, and he replied, ‘Of course! You’re a talented guy and you deserve to be up there. That’s your job!’ You know, I had never had a quarrel with Shaike about anything; not about music, not about money, nothing. There was a good vibe between him and me. In exchange for the conducting job, I decided to leave the majority of the royalties for the song to Shaike, which I was happy to give him. The working experience on this Eurovision song between the two of us was too satisfactory to quarrel about money; and I was going to get paid quite handsomely for my work as a conductor in the contest anyway, so I had no reason to complain.”
With Amir Frohlich as their conductor, the Israeli delegation travelled to Millstreet, a backwater in County Cork, Ireland, where the 1993 Eurovision Song Contest was held. Having won the Israeli selection as Sarah’le Sharon & Lahakat Shiru, the ensemble was now renamed simply as Lahakat Shiru, i.e. The Shiru Group, for the international performance.
“Even though we were happy about having won the Israeli final, deep in our heart Shaike and I knew we had a problem,” Amir continues digging into his memories. “What were we to do, now that we had to go abroad with a lead singer who was not so young anymore and who didn’t have the best vocals? How were we going to get a convincing performance to an international audience, who didn’t know Sarah’le? On top of that, there was Shaike, who was extremely professional, who had to work with a front woman, who was imbued with all the convictions she brought with her from the kibbutz about how to perform a song – sitting at the piano, surrounded by a group of singers. Inevitably, there would be a discussion about who was more important; Sarah’le or the singers of our group? It was clear that our vocal quartet sang excellent harmonies, something which Sarah’le couldn’t. That’s why Shaike and I wanted the group to take centre stage. Already while we were still in Tel Aviv, we knew there was going to be a bit of a misch-masch about this – and when we were in Millstreet, in fact, it turned into a very big misch-masch.”
“Coming to Ireland was quite an experience. I had never been before. I have never seen so much green in my life. The Irish countryside is incredibly green. After a week in Ireland, my eyes were suffering from greenicism! We were staying at a hotel in Cork, with a coach at our disposal which took us to the arena in Millstreet where the contest was held. In between rehearsals, we were taken on trips across the south of Ireland; to Killarney, to a chateau, and to the Atlantic coast. It was great. The Irish were even being nice to us, because there was no animosity between our countries at the time. Actually, I don’t know why they hate us, because they are more similar to Israelis than they like to think; they are very friendly people. You get into a pub, it doesn’t matter who you are or whom you are with; you’re getting acquainted with the locals easily – before you know it, they put a pint of Guinness in front of you, or a great dish of food. The whole experience was just amazing.”
“Inevitably, we were accompanied on our trip by two officers of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Actually, the precautions were pretty light on us; it was just these two guys, nothing more. There was one funny moment, when one of the girls in the group, Julia, needed to go to a pharmacy to buy some toiletry item she had forgotten to take along from Israel. Once these security guys got wind of it, they put her into a car and drove into downtown Cork like madmen – just like police officers are used to driving, rather recklessly. That’s what you get when you’re accompanied by the Mossad, I guess!”
Amir Frohlich with performer Sarah’le Sharon enjoying the Irish coastline on an excursion during the Eurovision week
“When we arrived at the concert venue for the first rehearsal, the conductor of the Irish orchestra (musical director Noel Kelehan – BT) was already waiting for us. Some of us were still getting out of the bus, when he asked, ‘Who is the conductor of the Israeli delegation?’ So I said, ‘I am!’ The first thing he then said to me was, ‘What’s a darbuka?’ Now, you have to know, because the song is about typical Israeli singalong gatherings, I was keen to create an oriental effect in the arrangement. That’s what gave me the idea of using a darbuka in the bridge, the middle part of the song. The darbuka is a goblet-shaped hand drum, a common instrument in folk music from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In the orchestral score which I had sent to Ireland, I had specifically marked the percussion part by writing down the word ‘darbuka’.”
“Nowadays, the darbuka is part and parcel of oriental-style pop music, but it wasn’t in 1993! Somehow, I had had a hunch about the Irish not knowing what it was, so I had brought a darbuka with me from Israel. I was carrying it as he spoke to me, so I could show it to him straightaway. ‘Oh, thank you,’ he replied with a sigh of relief, ‘we didn’t know where to get one, but you’ve just solved our problem.’ Lucky me that I had the sense to bring it with me!”
“Then, going inside and meeting the orchestra, I spoke to the percussionist about how to play the darbuka. In Israel, we have this instrument in our blood. Yemeni groups especially use it all the time. I miscalculated that the same would be true for the percussionist in an Irish symphony orchestra. I put the darbuka in front of him and gave him some instructions. He tried, but it was obvious that he felt uncomfortable with the situation. He was a very gentle guy, very polite, but after a while he said, ‘Please, I don’t know what to do with it.’ Like all of his colleagues in the orchestra, he was under quite a bit of strain, having to perform in a concert with songs and conductors from all over Europe, so I said, ‘No problem, I’ll do it myself!’ So that’s what I did. I knew the instrument well and was comfortable playing it. I put the darbuka with me on the conductor’s platform. A technician plugged a microphone into it. It was quite funny, because I got special treatment now that I was doubling as a conductor and a player!”
“While I took care of the darbuka, the percussionist played his part in our arrangement by playing the timpani simultaneously in that same middle part. In fact, we had a very pleasant discussion about how best to tackle the timpani part. Timpani tend to be very loud, drowning out the rest of the sound, but he was an excellent professional and gave me just the sound we needed for our song.”
“The score also included a guitar part which was beyond the range of that instrument. The guitarist in the Irish orchestra came to me and said, ‘Hey, Mr Conductor, are you aware you wrote me some notes which don’t exist on a guitar?’ Of course I knew exactly what I had done, so I explained to him that he just needed to push one of the strings of his guitars upwards, which will produce a higher sound. I said, ‘That’s how we natives do it in Israel!’ He understood it instantly and didn’t create any fuss. He even made a joke about it, replying with a laugh, ‘Alright, I’m not going to argue with natives’, and he did it exactly right in that first rehearsal. In fact, playing this high sound is common knowledge for guitarists, but he was an orchestral musician, used to reading scores and exactly following the notes on his sheet music. It was not so common to find this high guitar note in a written chart, so he raised his finger and asked, and it was good of him to do so. After the first rehearsal, he came back to me to ask if I was happy with the way he had played the part and I was, so I complimented him on that.”
“There was a piano for Sarah’le on stage, but just as a prop; it wasn’t plugged in. She was an ok piano player, although of course I wouldn’t pick her for a Rachmaninov piano concert! She played the chords alright, but it was safer to let the pianist in the orchestra play her part. The performance of our song was completely live. After that first rehearsal, I felt like walking on air. This was an excellent orchestra. The score sounded just like the studio recording. The sound was tight, really very good. I couldn’t have asked any more of them.”
The Israeli group rehearsing on stage in Millstreet’s Green Glens Arena, from left: Julia Proiter, Guy Brakha, Sarah’le Sharon, Rachel Haim, and Benny Nadler
However, the orchestra proved to be the least of the worries of the Israeli delegation. In 2012, when we interviewed composer and producer Shaike Paikov about his memories of the contest in Millstreet, he could still not hide his frustration about main singer Sarah’le Sharon who, according to him, got in touch with Anita Notaro, the Irish director of the show, behind his back to make sure that the cameras were on her rather than on the group. This completely derailed the original plan for the camera work, submitted by Shaike himself to the Irish organisation.
“All of a sudden, Sarah’le had an attitude,” Shaike recalled. “When we did the next rehearsal, we were extremely surprised to see that all cameras focused on Sarah’le (…). Soon, it became clear Sarah’le had a phone call with the director and told her that she was the singer of the group after all. There we were… it was obviously impossible to ask the director to adapt the camera work again, as she was very aggressive towards us and even claimed she would exclude us from the competition if we bothered her again about the camera approach.”
“Yes, Shaike had a heavy heart about the situation,” Amir comments. “He was so frustrated, that he even considered going home before the actual show. I heard from others about Shaike’s discussion with the Irish director in the corridors. I wasn’t involved in that myself. Shaike didn’t tell me about it, because he wanted to shield me from the bad energy between him and Sarah’le. This allowed me to focus on the orchestra. I didn’t want to get involved. I consciously went into splendid isolation to protect myself from feeling hurt. I did exactly what I had to do; I was on time for the bus which took us to the rehearsals, I put on a happy face at the parties which we attended, and I was making my usual jokes with the four group singers. They were my friends, but I never asked them how they felt. They must have had a hard time. I really switched off, staying away from all this as much as possible.”
“When thinking back on the camera work, our song was essentially an unbaked potato. The singers in the group were professional, Sarah’le did the best she could manage vocally, and the arrangement was ok, but when the camera work is off, that’s a big factor. The way the whole thing was projected on television looked like a free jam in jazz. Everybody knows how to play his part, but nothing has been organised properly. Eurovision is a TV show, in which every detail has to be organised to perfection. The shooting needs to be spot-on. But we came with one vision and then changed it during the rehearsals – in fact, so many times, that in the end nobody knew what to do. The performance you saw on television was actually the first proper rehearsal because what should have been our first rehearsal descended into a discussion backstage. ‘Let’s change this or that.’ Then the second rehearsal; the things which had been discussed had been corrected, but the discussions continued afterwards without reaching a proper conclusion – and then the concert came. That’s what happened.”
“In fact, I was so disgusted, yet so determined not to get involved, that I didn’t join the performers in the greenroom after the general rehearsal. Instead, I took my baton and withdrew to the bar to have a drink. As far as my responsibility went, which was the musical point of view, everything was ok. I didn’t have to tell anybody that he or she wasn’t singing correctly. Shaike and I had told the sound engineers in advance to lower the volume of Sarah’le’s microphone in favour of Varda’s. The sound balance was right, no problems there. Looking back, I wasn’t being the Renaissance person that I like to think I am – quite the opposite, I was narrow-mindedly focusing on my part of the job. I took no interest in what went on behind me on stage. I reasoned all of that was beyond my expertise, so what can you do in such a situation? You keep silent; and that’s what I did.”
The two male performers of the Shiru Group, Benny Nadler (left) and Guy Brakha, arriving at the venue in Millstreet
“During rehearsals, I made friends with the conductors from Norway and Cyprus. The Norwegian guy was Rolf Løvland; I don’t remember the name of the conductor from Cyprus (George Theophanous – BT). We were in the same time slot during rehearsals, listening to each other’s orchestral arrangements and giving little pieces of advice. ‘Pay attention to the trumpets getting in at the right time.’ At one point, the percussionist was a tad late in one of my rehearsals, and one of the others drew my attention to that, but honestly speaking, it was more about sharing a beer together than about work. On the night of the concert, we wished each other luck before going on stage. All of this was before Rolf became famous with Secret Garden. Rolf is a talented guy, and I admire him a lot. For years after the contest, the Cyprus guy, Rolf, and I stayed in touch, occasionally giving each other a call, ‘Hey, my friend, how are you doing?’ Meeting these two guys in Ireland was one of the most pleasant things about this whole Eurovision experience.”
Then, the night of the Eurovision concert came. The camera work for the Israeli entry was a disaster and, what was more, the vocal parts of Sarah’le Sharon were clearly not what they should be, to the dismay of Shaike Paikov. “Sarah’le killed everything,” he said in 2012. “She sang too loud and out of tune.” Another striking element in the Israeli performance was that one of the choruses was sung entirely in English, in clear breach of the Eurovision rules. In our interview with Paikov, who passed away in 2025, we failed to ask him about this. There may have been a connection to the Croatian entry, which wasn’t just partly performed in English, but even bore an English title, ‘Don’t Ever Cry’. When EBU officials did not ask the Croats to adapt their performance, the temptation on the part of other delegations to use some English as well must have been strong.
“Honestly, I don’t know anything about that,” Amir Frohlich comments. “That’s yet another bit in which I didn’t get involved. However, I do remember something completely different. I told you about Varda Zamir, the backing singer who was there to sing the parts of Sarah’le, just to give her part of the vocal arrangement a more convincing sound. All week, she had behaved perfectly professionally. Her role wasn’t very glamourous, because there was no camera on her, but that was her role. You know what happened? In the concert, she ignored the vocal arrangement and started singing lines which were intended for Julia. She gave herself the freedom on stage during the Eurovision performance to do whatever. I’m sorry to sound a little bit rude, but her role was to be an instrument, a human instrument standing on that stage. That’s why she had the opportunity to travel to Ireland, where all her expenses were paid for; she was staying at an excellent hotel, having a good time. She must have thought, ‘I’m here once in my life, so let’s take centre-stage.’ It would be the same if the percussionist of a symphony orchestra, who only has one little intervention on the tambourine at bar 602 in a Mahler symphony, invents all kinds of additional lines for himself on the spot. Her behaviour was unprofessional. I was a little bit angry about it at the time, but I guess she was just the final nail in our coffin.”
“In spite of all the fuss around me, I thoroughly enjoyed the concert. In the course of my life, I had taught myself to focus on what I did. Conducting that orchestra was sheer excitement. First came the moment when the camera was on me and I took a bow. I had decided to dedicate my bow to my father, Ernst, who had died not long before. He was 82 years old. ‘This is for you, father – here I am taking a bow in front of half a milliard people – can you see me now?’ That bit was very emotional, but I was cool and collected at the same time. When I turned around to face that orchestra, I became a machine. I had a metronome with me, just to make sure that I didn’t make a mistake with the tempo, but I was pretty sure of myself anyway. As a conductor I’m a cold fish. Conducting is a profession; and it’s a profession I studied at an academic level. There was nothing to worry about.”
“When the middle part of the song came, I was consciously looking at the percussionist while playing the darbuka. He was playing the timpani. I put a big smile on my face and he smiled back at me. Without saying a word we were joking, doing our job with a sense of humour. After I was done, I just took up my baton again to continue conducting. The guitarist also looked at me while playing the high note we had discussed in the first rehearsal, and he did a great job like all the rest of them. After we were finished, these two guys and some other members of the orchestra raised their hands to me in applause. It just shows you how good the atmosphere was between them and me.”
“Then the voting happened and we finished second-last. I wasn’t surprised. During rehearsals, I was approached by a lady who was there as a journalist for a Korean newspaper. I had no idea why she was there, but anyway, she asked me about Sarah’le, ‘Is she the mother of the group?’ At that point, I knew that we were lost. In our delegation backstage, people were being cynical. ‘Ok, that was it then. We wanted Sarah’le, so we got Sarah’le.’ Something along that line. That’s what people do to come to terms with disappointments; nothing wrong with it. Poor Julia was a little upset and I guess Guy was too young to really grasp what had happened. Benny was more mature and he took it quite well. I remember saying to him, ‘Let’s take it as an experience’. In the Hebrew language, we have a new word for experience, hashlava, which has the specific meaning ‘taking the good times as well as the bad’. They come as a package.”
Amir (second from left) in Millstreet with Israeli journalist Amos Oren (far left), Shaike Paikov, director Yaakov Asal, and lyricist Yoram Tahar-Lev
“When we landed at Tel Aviv Airport, there was a large delegation from Sarah’le’s kibbutz cheering for her when she passed through the gate, ‘For us, you’ll always be number one’. In the end, what is a person? A person is his environment, the people around him, his friends. She went back to her kibbutz and her garden. Her life didn’t change after Eurovision, and I think that was true for most of us. I came back home and asked my wife, ‘Where is the garbage, let me go downstairs and put it in the wheely bin.’ Yoram Tahar-Lev, the lyricist, continued writing and performing.”
“I think the person who suffered most from what had happened was Shaike. He had invested most in this project, emotionally speaking, more than me or Yoram or even Sarah’le. I never asked him how he felt exactly, because the story of the Shiru Group ended straight after Eurovision and there were new projects to focus on. There was some minor satisfaction for him, when the Eurovision song was picked up by a Belgian record company, Madierpo, who released it as a single. Because we only had that one song, I got back into the studio with a young guy called Eran Bain to do a disco remix of ‘Shiru’, which was included on the Belgian release. In Israel, the song was never marketed commercially. It was only later on that it was included on some sampler albums of Israeli Eurovision hits.”
“As for the group, Racheli Haim and my friend Benny Nadler continued working as backing vocalists, as did Julia Proiter. She only lived in Israel for some five years, eventually moving to America where she’s still working as a singer in Russian-style orchestras. Racheli later married Alon Hillel, one of the best drummers in Israel with whom I did a lot of recordings. Unfortunately, Racheli fell victim to a horrible disease. It was a real tragedy when she passed away (in 2023 at the age of 66 – BT). Benny later became a vocal teacher. Guy Brakha became a director, but he also performed as an actor in some movies and he’s still an excellent singer. I still meet him for large events, such as Independence Day and Memorial Day, in which I have regularly been involved as a musical arranger or choral conductor. He and Benny are great guys. The only person I never met again after the contest was Varda Zamir. She vanished over the horizon, probably still living in Eilat today.”
“Shaike allowed his work tempo to slow down in the second half of the 1990s, which meant that our long-standing partnership came to an end. I’m still immensely grateful to him for allowing me to enjoy Eurovision in the good old-fashioned way, conducting the orchestra. To me, the orchestra made Eurovision fun. There is a little story connected to this. When ‘Hallelujah’ won Eurovision for Israel in 1979, I was watching television. I was quite young at the time, in my early twenties, a student at the academy. During the performance by Milk & Honey, I watched Kobi Oshrat conducting the orchestra. At that point I told myself, ‘One day, I want to be on that stage too!’. The years went by and I composed many songs for the Kdam, but, with the exception of ‘Ai ahavot shlanu’ for Ofra Haza in 1980, they were never chosen for the final. Then, out of nowhere, Shaike picked me up and put me on the Eurovision stage as a conductor in 1993. It was the fulfilment of my dreams! I couldn’t have been more excited.”
“You know that I studied classical conducting at the academy in Tel Aviv. However, knowing in my heart that my path was in contemporary music and that I was never going to conduct a symphony orchestra or a classical choir, the next-best thing was Eurovision. I had been a conductor in the Hassidic Festival in Israel, but the orchestra for that event was markedly smaller. A Eurovision orchestra used to consist of some sixty players. The orchestra I got to work with in Ireland was fantastic; all of them were excellent professionals. This was certainly the best orchestra I’ve worked with. The musicians had a great mentality. They didn’t think of Eurovision as a routine. They were all motivated to give their best. Then I raised my hand, counted them in, and the music just fell over me like a waterfall. You cannot imagine how good it feels to stand there. All the energy is coming toward you, with this big monster playing your score. There is a Jewish saying which is, ‘The person who is happy with his part is a happy person.’ All those years after watching Kobi Oshrat conducting in Eurovision, I stood on that same platform. I told myself, ‘Ok, now you’ve got it!’”
“Of course, Kobi won Eurovision and I finished near the bottom, but what’s the use of living with a bad feeling for the rest of your life? There is a famous song in Israel which is called ‘The day of my joy is the day of my sorrow’, which pretty much sums it up for me, although the joyful emotion in me is much stronger than the sorrow. I know that I did everything in my power to get a good result. What more could I have done?”
The Shiru Group on stage in Ireland, as Amir Frohlich, barely visible in the far left-hand side of the picture, conducts the RTÉ Concert Orchestra
“Looking back, that week in Ireland was the climax of my life. When coming back to Israel, I honestly asked myself, ‘Now that I’ve fulfilled my dream, what shall I do with the remainder of my life?’ The memories of Eurovision are still so fresh. I even remember the colour of the wallpaper in my hotel room. That entire week I was taking pictures in my mind, taking in every part of the experience, just because I realised that this was probably going to be the only time in my life to do Eurovision and to work with such an orchestra. It was like being in paradise. Of course, it would have been nice if there had been a camera on me when I played the darbuka part, but there was so much ego-tripping going on in the Israeli delegation regarding cameras that nobody thought of the conductor. It doesn’t matter. It was enough that I got to take my bow.”
“As I already anticipated in Millstreet, I never returned to the contest. Two years after me, my friend Gadi Goldman got to conduct the Israeli entry in Eurovision (‘Amen’, performed by Liora – BT). When I heard that Gadi would do the job, I offered him my advice. I didn’t interfere in anything he did because he’s an excellent musician, but we had a chat just to talk about my experience and tell him about what he could expect. I was happy to give him some pieces of advice which perhaps made him just a tad more confident in the leadup to the event.”
“There’s one more funny anecdote connected to my participation in the Eurovision Song Contest. My daughter lived and worked in London for thirteen years. In fact – and this is not the fun part – she has just moved back to Israel, because the antisemitism she experienced after the 7th of October 2023 became unbearable. When she worked there, she found there was quite a big community of fans keenly following Eurovision. When these friends of hers found out that her father had taken part in the contest as a conductor, they started treating her as a noblewoman, the princess of Eurovision. Of course I had a good laugh when she told me this story!”
“I still watch Eurovision, but only parts. I cannot bear watching it uninterruptedly. I have to get up and walk out of the room regularly. All those pyrotechnics and dance routines are not for me. It’s too much. When the orchestra was taken out of the competition, I more or less stopped taking a real interest. With playbacks, it has become a fake game – more a television show than a music competition. When you listen closely to the songs, the sound has become more or less exchangeable. The guys who work in music production nowadays know how to create a spectacular sound, lots of bam-bam, but most of them don’t know how to write a simple flute line. Most producers and songwriters don’t have the classical background that old-school arrangers used to have.”
“Inspiration is a combination of what you hear, what you feel, and what you want to produce. When your vocabulary is rich, it means that you can come up with many different ideas, but that notion seems to have gone out of the window in modern pop music. Somehow, audiences watching Eurovision nowadays expect acts which are larger than life. Just a singer and a conductor are not enough. I don’t think you can get back to the old situation – perhaps if there’s a revolution in the world of music, but I’m approaching 71 now and even if I get to live another twenty or thirty years, I’m pretty sure that I won’t live to tell.”
“Sadly, last year (in 2025 – BT), Shaike Paikov passed away at the age of 88. It’s so sad that he’s no longer here. Whereas I still feel great sorrow about his passing, it gives me joy to note that younger generations are still keen to listen to his songs. He wrote quite a lot of Israeli classics, patriotic songs that people still love to sing along to. In fact, some youngsters are picking up the songs by Shaike and also by a guy like Kobi Oshrat to turn them into disco, trance, and all that stuff. It proves that a good melody is still a good melody, in whichever form. Somehow, songwriters today seem unable to produce the quality of songs that Shaike and other composers from his generation came up with. Because I admire his gift to write such great melodies, I’ve decided to create a tribute to his music. I’m in the process of rearranging a set of songs for my amateur choirs. I’ve now finished eight songs – eight new vocal arrangements. I want to have ten in total and then create a show highlighting Shaike’s contribution to Israeli popular music. I owe a lot to him, I’m very grateful to him, and I feel this is the least I can do to honour his legacy. Shaike deserves it.”
Amir Frohlich backstage on the night of the contest
OTHER ARTISTS ABOUT AMIR FROHLICH
So far, we have not gathered comments from other artists who worked with Amir Frohlich.
EUROVISION INVOLVEMENT YEAR BY YEAR
Country – Israel
Song title – “Shiru”
Rendition – Lahakat Shiru (Sarah’le Sharon / Guy Brakha / Rachel Haim / Benny Nadler / Julia Proiter / Varda Zamir)
Lyrics – Yoram Tahar-Lev
Live orchestration – Amir Frohlich
Conductor – Amir Frohlich
Score – 24th place (4 votes)
SOURCES & LINKS
- Bas Tukker did an interview with Amir Frohlich, May 2026
- A playlist with some of the music created by Amir Frohlich can be found by clicking this YouTube link
- Photos courtesy of Amir Frohlich & Ferry van der Zant
- Many thanks to Lily Beatrice Cooper for proofreading the manuscript
