Yiddish concert

My dear Friends

Sorry for the delay in writing. I seem to be surrounded by music at the moment, and I have just been to a very interesting concert. Mark Glanville is a bass-baritone who has much experience in opera as well as lieder, and his accompanist, Alexander Knapp, is an acclaimed musicologist, arranger and composer, mainly of Jewish music. I met Alex about 25 years ago, when I was thinking about becoming a Jewish Cantor in the Synagogue. (This was just before my Christian days.)

These two friends gave a very moving and impressive Yiddish version of Schubert's great song cycle Die Schone Mullerin. Mark, the singer, explained in the programme notes that the German-Yiddish juxtaposition was his contribution to reconcilation and forgiveness, as his mother had lost a lot of her family in the Holocaust. That aspect gave me much heart for my own work and the little concert I gave two weeks ago.

The concert consisted of twenty one songs, quite a musical feat! They were varied in tone and although not a direct translation of the Schubert cycle, follwed the tale of unrequited love. They were dark in tone, with a few glimpses of something lighter, but were a tour de force of the Yiddish language, which I hardly know. Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, who came from Russia and Poland and others parts of the Slavonic world. My own paternal grandparents came from Belarus, and their language was Yiddish, which was passed down to my father, who spoke it fluently although he was born in Leeds in 1897, the first of eight children.

After the concert I met a yooung man from Baltimore who teaches Yiddish in the university with his wife, and we discussed the fact that I had always felt Hebrew to be superior to Yiddish, and he said they had co-existed for hundreds of years.

But that's another Blog!
Shabbat Shalom, have a great weekend!
Sister Gila