Judith Berkson Presents: Cantorial Music from the YIVO Archives
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From the YIVO Archives
Sponsored by the Sidney Krum Estate. |
Acclaimed singer-musician Judith Berkson presents arrangements of cantorial music from YIVO’s sound archives, including unreleased and rare recordings from Eastern Europe’s golden age of cantorial singing. Berkson, Frank London, Lana Cencic, and Cleek Schrey reinterpret the sounds of Berele Chagy, Yechiel Karniol, and Sophie Kurtzer, and perform original works by Berkson inspired by the YIVO sound collections.
About the Performers
Judith Berkson (arranger and composer; Farfisa and Viscount vintage analog organs, vocals, and effects) is a Brooklyn-based soprano, pianist, composer and cantor with a range of musical styles including: art songs from Schubert to Schoenberg; Jazz and avant-garde; classical piano; and experimental extended technique. She has composed and arranged music for the Kronos Quartet. Her CD Oylam was released by ECM Records and described as "Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record. I can't get enough of it."—New York Times. She has played at the Bruckner Tage in Austria, the American Festival of Microtonal Music and the Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow, and has premiered works by Gérard Pape, Ken Thomson, Joe Maneri, Matthew Welch, Ohad Talmor, Steve Coleman, Hans Breder, Carlos Cuellar, and Julia Werntz. Berkson has sung with the Delphian Jazz Orchestra, Wet Ink New Music Collective, The Four Bags, ASM New Music Ensemble and Theodore Bikel. Judith is also a cantor and teaches liturgical music at Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn. She studied voice at New England Conservatory with Lucy Shelton, theory and composition with Joe Maneri, and piano with Judith Godfrey and Viola Haas.
Additional press: "She's creating an atmosphere, one long reverie, and she stamps her own disposition on the broad range of songs she chooses to cover"—New York Times
Lana Cencic (a.k.a Lana Is) (Farfisa and Viscount vintage analog organs, vocals and effects) is a multifaceted vocalist-composer and actress with widespread acclaim in Europe. She has collaborated with rock, pop, contemporary classical and jazz musicians such as John Medeski, Kenny Wollesen, Dan Weiss, Michael Mantler, Manu Delago (Bjork) and more. Cencic has performed at festivals such as “The Winter Jazzfest,” “Kyoto Music Expo,” “Musikverein," "Konzerthaus Wien," "Porgy & Bess," and NYC venues, The Blue Note, The Stone, Roulette and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cencic’s avant-garde jazz-pop-rock album In Your Head recorded in New York with guitarist Brandon Seabrook, displays experimental onomatopoeia with atonal multi-layered singing and instrumental ornamentation, with references to Balkan folklore. “In Your Head, her 2013 breakthrough solo album, is widely celebrated by critics and fans alike, establishing Lana Is as a startlingly original creative force with a seemingly limitless future.”—The Rolling Stone Magazine
Frank London (trumpet) is a member of The Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave, and has performed with John Zorn, LL Cool J, Mel Torme, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, and is featured on over 100 CDs. His own recordings include Invocations (cantorial music); Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars’ Di Shikere Kapelye and Brotherhood of Brass; Nigumin; The Zmiros Project and others.
His projects include the folk-opera A Night in the Old Marketplace, Davenen for Pilobolus and The Klezmatics, Great Small Works' The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, and Min Tanaka’s Romance. He composed music for John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet and Men with Guns, and Yvonne Rainer's Murder and Murder. He has been featured on HBO’s Sex and the City, at the North Sea Jazz Festival and Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and is a co-founder of Les Miserables Brass Band and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.
Cleek Schrey (Hardanger d'amore fiddle) Described by the Irish Times as "a musician utterly at one with his instrument and his music," Cleek Schrey is a fiddler and composer from Virginia. An active member of traditional music communities in America and Ireland, he plays in the Ghost Trio with Ivan Goff and Iarla Ó Lionáird. His work has been presented at Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation in Brooklyn, Storm King Art Center, the Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Lumen Performance Art Festival, and the Bridge Progressive Art Center. Cleek frequently makes music for dance, having worked with choreographers Douglas Dunn and Bill T. Jones and percussive dancers Sandy Silva and Nic Gareiss. He has studied composition with David Behrman, Paul Caputo, Bunita Marcus, and Walter Zimmermann. The journal Sound Post has noted that Cleek "possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound." He is currently pursuing a Masters in Music Composition at Wesleyan University.