Beregovski Suite with Alicia Svigals and Uli Geissendoerfer

Beregovski Suite with Alicia Svigals and Uli Geissendoerfer
Date and Time
Tuesday February 19th, 2019
7:30 - 9:00pm
Location
Roble Dance Studio R113
About this event

Twenty years ago, Alicia Svigals released her groundbreaking album Fidl, the first contemporary recording of the deep and ecstatic klezmer fiddle music which had been beloved across Jewish Eastern Europe for hundreds of years.  This year, she follows up Fidl with Beregovski Suite, a project with Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer. Together, they bring to life long-lost melodies from the early 20th-century fieldwork of Moshe Beregovski and re-imagine them for the 21st century.

In the 1930s, the Jewish Ukrainian scholar Moshe Beregovski set out, with eery prescience, to collect and preserve the deep and rich Jewish musical tradition around him. On what turned out to be the eve of the destruction of European Jewry, Beregovski organized expeditions to Ukrainian shtetlekh (small Jewish towns) and sought out the eldest singers and instrumentalists he could find, asking them to pour their collective folk knowledge into his recording horn. In this way, he managed to save thousands of beautiful Jewish folk songs, klezmer dance tunes, and religious melodies on wax cylinders (the medium of the day). A few years afterwards, the culture he had documented was destroyed in the Holocaust, and Beregovski himself was arrested and sent to the Gulag. He never saw his work published in his lifetime, and for decades, it was thought that those precious and important recordings were gone forever. But in the 1980s, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin published Beregovski’s transcriptions of his collection, and in the 1990s, with the opening of the Soviet Union, the cylinders were unearthed in a dusty archive in Kiev. Now those long-forgotten melodies and voices are beginning to speak to us again.

Violinist Alicia Svigals is the world’s foremost klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, who have collaborated with artists ranging from Itzhak Perlman to Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Uli Geissendoerfer is a Grammy–nominated jazz and world music pianist and composer.

Event Sponsor
Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Music, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Department of Theater & Performance Studies