The Joys of Yiddish Poetry
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the concert and release party for my friend Alex Weiser’s gorgeous new CD, called … and all the days were purple. Weiser is director of public programs at YIVO, but in his civilian life he’s a composer of new art song and opera. With this project he has taken (mostly) Yiddish poetry and written new settings for voice and strings, elegantly bringing together his two worlds.
We picked up oversize handouts on the way into the Center for Jewish History’s auditorium. As I settled into my favorite seat (back row, aisle) I looked down with some surprise. The first song on the program was in Hebrew, a Yoel Engel setting of the Shaul Tchernichovsky poem “They Say There Is a Land (Omrim Yeshna Eretz).” In designing the concert, Weiser wasn’t content to just show off his own compositions. He chose to open the program with a selection of music and texts from the YIVO archives, arranging them for voice, piano, and string quartet. These selections went all the way back to the legendary St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. The society was an elite group of Jewish musicians at the beginning of the 20th century, students of Rimsky-Korsakov, who set out to collect and study Yiddish folk music as a way of creating a new, highly refined approach to Jewish music. Engel was also a part of S. Ansky’s famous ethnographic expeditions. It was during those expeditions that Ansky collected the material he would turn into The Dybbuk and it was Engel who would compose the score for the show.