Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

Reaching back into the riches of the Jewish musical past, we can’t resist sharing this Hanukkah chestnut for all our friends in both snowy and sunny climes.

The French Center for Jewish Music (Le Centre Français des Musiques Juives), an organization dedicated to promoting France’s Jewish musical traditions, recently announced that it is organizing a concert dedicated to the Kaddish on November 27th and 30th at Union Libérale Israélite de France in Paris. More than 15 musical versions of the Kaddish will be performed, including two world premieres (Charles Bornstein and Jean-François Zygel). To learn more, please visit the Center’s website.

Pro Musica Hebraica is pleased to announce that Research Director James Loeffler’s book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, has recently won two awards: The 2011 ASCAP Deems-Taylor Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology Book, and the 2011 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Drawing on a mass of unpublished writings and archival sources from prerevolutionary Russian conservatories, this book offers an insightful account of the Jewish search for a modern identity in Russia through music, rather than politics or religion. To preview the book, click here. To purchase the book from Amazon, click here.

Joan Reinthaler, writing for the Washington Post, reviews Pro Musica Hebraica’s November 3 concert:
Continue Reading »

From National Public Radio:

A woman named Liese, who had been an SS guard at Auschwitz years before, is on a ship to Brazil with her much older diplomat husband, a man unaware of her past. She spots a fellow passenger she thinks she recognizes: an inmate of hers she thought had died.

Music aficionados have been hailing a lost Soviet-era opera — the plot of which turns on that very moment — as a forgotten masterpiece. The opera has its genesis in the real-life experience of Zofia Posmysz, a Polish Catholic sent to Auschwitz after she was caught reading an anti-Nazi leaflet. Posmysz wrote the novel on which the libretto for The Passenger was based.
Continue Reading »