the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
POSTPONED: Keyboard Kaleidoscope: Three Pianists on Two Pianos: Phoenix Chamber Ensemble Performs Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, and Bizet
PLEASE NOTE: This event has been temporarily postponed. More details to follow.
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky with guest artist Ellen Braslavsky (piano) for an evening of Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, and Bizet.
Program:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata in D Major, K. 448, for Two Pianos, Four Hands
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Suite No.1. Op.5 for Two Pianos, Four Hands
Alfred Schnittke, Gogol Suite, arranged for two pianos by Valery Borovikov
Georges Bizet, Carmen Suite for Piano Six Hands, arranged by J. Kowalewski
Founded in 2005 by pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky, the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble has become a vital part of the New York classical community, presenting more than 70 public concerts at the Center for Jewish History. The ensemble has garnered a devoted following with its innovative programming and sensitive interpretations, earned an international reputation presenting concerts in Russia, Poland, Italy, and other European venues, and collaborated with numerous acclaimed guest artists, including clarinetist David Krakauer, the Grammy-nominated Enso Quartet, the Tesla Quartet, members of the Jasper String Quartet, the New York Little Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet.
Made possible by the Stravinsky Institute Foundation through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Ticket Info: This event has been temporarily postponed. More details to follow.
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the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
concert
Leo Zeitlin and the Music of His World - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) was a composer, violinist, violist, and conductor born in Pinsk who specialized in classical works infused with Jewish themes. Best known for his Eli Zion for cello and orchestra, Zeitlin was an active member of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music and spent formative years teaching and conducting in Ekaterinoslav and Vilna before emigrating to New York, where he worked as an arranger and violist for the Capitol Theatre.
After his death, Zeitlin’s music fell into obscurity until cellist and musicologist Paula Eisenstein Baker (1939–2024) began studying and championing his work in the late 1980s. Eisenstein Baker’s publications in YIVO Annual and other journals, as well as her critical edition of Zeitlin’s complete chamber music for A-R Editions, were instrumental in reviving his legacy. This concert celebrates Eisenstein Baker’s scholarship and the recent donation of her archival collection to YIVO.
Performances by Julian Schwarz (cello), Marika Bournaki (piano), Peter Sirotin and Daniel Kurganov (violins), Colin Brookes (viola), and Ori Marcu (mezzo-soprano) will feature a variety of chamber and vocal music by Zeitlin, alongside works by composers with whom he was in dialogue, including Joseph Achron, Alexander Krein, Joachim Stutschewsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Lazare Saminsky, Joel Engel, Alexander Zhitomirsky, and Michael Lewin.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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concert
Celebrating Vienna’s Center for Banned Music - In-person Program
Members of the Vienna Philharmonic with distinguished Czech pianist David Hausknecht celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Vienna’s Exilarte – Center for Banned Music and the 10th Anniversary of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna’s Exilarte Research Center, with a performance of music by Gustav Mahler, Erwin Schulhoff, and Walter Bricht.
This concert honors the voices of those composers, performers, music researchers, and theater artists who were considered “degenerate” and were silenced by the Nazis during the Third Reich, and whose works have often been forgotten. For two decades, the Exilarte Center has served as a contact point and interface for the reception, research, preservation, and presentation of this important cultural heritage.
The concert will be followed by a reception.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk and concert
Partisan Song: Stories and Music of Holocaust Resistance – In-Person Program
Speaker: Dr. James A. Grymes
Musical performances by the University Chorale of UNC Charlotte, Dr. Jason Dungee, Director
A civil engineer and amateur musician, Moshe Gildenman had never even held a weapon until the Nazis invaded his hometown in Ukraine and killed 2,200 Jews, including his wife and daughter. Vowing revenge, he escaped to the forest with his son and formed one of the most successful partisan units in the guerilla war to fight the Nazis.
In his latest book, Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge, historian and National Jewish Book Award-winning author James A. Grymes chronicles the electrifying story of how this peaceful community member became a fierce resistance leader, and how music fueled his courage.
Join us for an evening of storytelling and music, as Grymes and the University Chorale of UNC Charlotte present readings from Partisan Song interspersed with performances of songs that inspired heroism during the Holocaust – music from the Yiddish songbook that Gildenman carried through the war, reconstructions of songs he composed in the ghetto and forest, and beloved anthems such as "Zog nit keyn mol." Grymes will also briefly introduce each song and English translations will be projected onscreen.
The program will be followed by a reception where the book will be available for purchase and signing.
This program is presented by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is supported in part by the Crane Family Charitable Foundation and the Blumenthal Foundation.
About the Speaker
Dr. James A. Grymes is a critically acclaimed author who frequently appears as a public speaker at libraries, museums, synagogues, and universities, as well as prominent venues such as the United Nations Headquarters, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, and the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. An internationally respected musicologist, he has been featured in interviews by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, and CNN. Dr. Grymes lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a recipient of a National Jewish Book Award for his earlier work Violins of Hope: Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour.
About the Chorale
The University Chorale of UNC Charlotte (above photo: credit Toby Schuetze), directed by Dr. Jason Dungee, is the flagship choral ensemble of the UNC Charlotte Department of Music. Consisting of both music majors and nonmajors, the Chorale proudly serves as ambassadors of the music department and the University at large, frequently performing in the greater Charlotte area and various locations throughout the southeastern United States. The Chorale has participated in several prestigious performances both domestically and abroad, including in Madrid, Spain for the 25th Anniversary Gala of the Gredos San Diego schools, and Venice, Italy, at the historic St. Mark’s Basilica.
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Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk and concert
concert
Musical Memoir - In-person Program
Join us for a special concert of the New York premiere of Muriel’s Songs (2023) by Eric Chasalow and a performance of Alex Weiser's Coney Island Days (2022), two song cycles that commemorate the composers’ grandmothers and detail how they navigated 20th century American Jewish life in New York City. The program will open with Joan Tower’s Petroushskates (1980).
Muriel’s Songs traverses the tumult of 20th century America from the very personal, intimate, and primarily domestic perspective of Chasalow’s grandmother, Muriel, with each song inhabiting its own musical world with stylistic points of departure from Baroque to Tin Pan Alley, The Beatles, Latin Jazz and Disco to Milton Babbitt. The songs describe Muriel’s experiences coming of age and through adulthood, including piano lessons, marriage, and family vacations.
Coney Island Days sets to music words from an oral history interview with Weiser’s grandmother, Irene, about childhood in the bilingual immigrant world of Coney Island in the 1930s and ‘40s. Irene would buy penny candies, spend days at the movies, explore Coney Island’s rides and beaches, eat at Nathan’s, and spend summers living behind her family’s knish store.
Both song cycles serve as love letters to the composers’ grandmothers and invoke the nostalgia of 20th century New York Jewish life.
This concert will be performed by the Talea Ensemble, followed by a discussion with Chasalow and Weiser.
About the Participants
Drawing from every corner of the soundworld, Eric Chasalow creates genre-defying music. As a mentor and long time arts advocate, he works tirelessly to nurture developing composers and encourage a community with the greatest respect for the arts and artists. Part of the last generation of composers to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Eric has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Eric’s music has been commissioned and performed by numerous soloists and ensembles in the US and abroad including Talea Ensemble (New York), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), and California EAR Unit (Los Angeles). Eric is the Irving Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University where he directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (BEAMS). He is a proud alumnus of Bates College, studied at New England Conservatory of Music, and earned the DMA from Columbia University, studying primarily with Mario Davidovsky.
Alex Weiser is the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute where he curates programs that explore history with an eye to contemporary Jewish culture. As a composer, Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. The album features songs in Yiddish and English sung by Eliza Bagg. A second album, in a dark blue night, features two song cycles which explore Jewish New York history sung by Annie Rosen. Other projects include operas Tevye’s Daughters with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann (American Lyric Theater), andState of the Jews and The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan (American Opera Projects).
Recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the Talea Ensemble has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres. In addition to a robust NYC performance season, festival engagements have included the Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the KAIROS, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels. Talea supports early-career composers through US school residencies, a commissioning program, and a composer recording workshop.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM & YIVO members: $12; Seniors & students: $9
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concert
Khantshe in Amerike — An Operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a performance of the music of Khantshe in Amerike, a 1912 operetta with music by Joseph Rumshinsky, play by Nokhem Rakov, and lyrics by Isidore Lillian.
Premiered in New York City, Khantshe in Amerike was subsequently performed around the world. The show was a turning point in Rumshinsky’s output, noted for having put “American rhythm” on the Yiddish stage for the first time according to Yiddish theater historian Zalmen Zylbercweig (1894–1972). Khantshe was also a star vehicle which marked a pivotal moment in the career of singer, actor, and impresario Bessie Tomashefsky.
Khantshe in Amerike is a musical comedy whose action revolves around an independent minded young woman named Khantshe who dresses as a man and becomes the chauffeur for the wealthy Rubin Goldhendler. The show touches on serious topics including love, gender, women's suffrage and the changing social status of women in turn-of-the-century America.
Reconstructed from a variety of archival materials collected at YIVO—including from the recently donated Tomashefsky Archive from Michael Tilson Thomas—the operetta will be performed by students of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
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