Jankiel's Legacy: Poland's Klezmer Music Heritage
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Concert and Lecture
Presented by The Center for Traditional Music and Dance, The Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center, YIVO, and Center for Jewish History. Admission: $10 |
All Polish schoolchildren know the character of Jankiel, the wise, old Jewish tsimbl (dulcimer) player featured in Pan Tadeusz, the epic masterpiece by Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. For hundreds of years, Jewish klezmer developed in shtetls throughout historic Polish territories as well as in cities like Warsaw, Krakow, Vilna, Lviv, and Lodz. In recent decades there has been a resurgence of interest among Poles in Jewish music, and today Poland is home to some of the world's largest Yiddish music festivals. Join two internationally acclaimed tsimbl players, Pete Rushefsky, Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and Walter Zev Feldman, a pioneer of the klezmer revival and one of the music's leading scholars, as well as special guests for a multi-media presentation and performance exploring Poland's klezmer heritage.
About the Performers
Pete Rushefsky is the Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, one of the nation’s foremost organizations working to preserve, present and educate the public about immigrant performing arts traditions. As a performer, Rushefsky is internationally acclaimed as a revivalist of the tsimbl (cimbalom), the traditional hammered dulcimer of klezmer music. He is currently performing with violinist Itzhak Perlman as part of a program on cantorial and Yiddish music that features the acclaimed cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot and klezmer legends Hankus Netsky and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Rushefsky has performed at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Library of Congress and Boston’s Symphony Hall. He been featured on PBS and NPR and served as the curator of the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Yiddish performing arts program. Rushefsky regularly performs with today’s leading Yiddish and klezmer musicians world-wide.
Walter Zev Feldman is a visiting professor of music at NYU in Abu Dhabi and a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. During the 1970s he spearheaded the revival of klezmer music. Today he is a performer on the traditional klezmer dulcimer, the tsimbl, and on the Ottoman lute, the tanbur. He has performed internationally with his group Khevrisa, and with the Alexander Fiterstein Trio. His book, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Verlag) is taught as a basic text worldwide. Feldman contributed to the "Ottoman Music" and "Klezmer Music" articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Oxford University Press). In 2004, he co-directed the successful application of the Mevlevi Dervishes of Turkey as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity for UNESCO. Feldman is currently finishing his book Klezmer: Music, History and Memory, and is researching a new book on the transnational klezmer tradition of Moldova. He is also an authority on East European Jewish dance.
