Author Archives: Hillel Ofek

For the first time ever in North America, the ARC Ensemble will be performing one of the great musical discoveries of the past 50 years, the suppressed works of Ukrainian master composer, Dmitri Klebanov. The concert will be recorded by CBC Radio for a national broadcast. Concert information: The Music of Dmitri Klebanov Sunday, November… Continue Reading »

Cellist Aron Zelkowicz, the founder and director of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival, has chosen the centenary anniversary to celebrate the historic Zimro Ensemble: Formed in 1918 in St. Petersburg, Russia, by the clarinetist Simeon Bellison, the Zimro Ensemble introduced the world to Jewish concert works created during the previous decade. This innovative and exotic… Continue Reading »

From New Music USA: There is a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Yiddish, the historic language of Central and East European Jewry, never had either and suffered miscategorization as a jargon and corruption of German. On the contrary, Yiddish is an extraordinarily rich language with a remarkable… Continue Reading »

From Gramophone: The UK premiere of Symphony No 21 in Symphony Hall last November was a watershed moment for Weinberg’s reputation. It actually proved two things I wouldn’t have dared to predict: that one of his longest symphonies (55 minutes, six movements without a break, composed in 1991) could hold a full-size regular concert audience… Continue Reading »

James Loeffler, reflecting on Charles Krauthammer’s view of Pro Musica Hebraica’s mission: As word grew of the Pro Musica Hebraica concert series, entreaties and proposals began to roll in from across the world. Inevitably, the media also came calling in search of a great story about how one of their own took up this quixotic… Continue Reading »