Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish music, including klezmer and other traditions.
Lipa Schmeltzer, the Hasidic superstar we can’t stop talking about, keeps pushing buttons. Yesterday the Orthodox news site Vos Iz Neias picked up reports from the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Schmeltzer is shooting a new music video with Israeli soldiers, dressed as a soldier himself. “Schmeltzer shot footage for the video several days ago in…
In a “grizzled, laconic drawl,” wrote Gregory Cowles in The New York Times, Gregg Allman’s recently published autobiography, “My Cross to Bear,” provides a “rambling backstage account of five decades with the Allman Brothers Band.” But it’s Allman’s Jewish co-author, Alan Light, who translated the rock legend’s rough-hewn tall tales of excess into “crisply ironed”…
Two enthralling recordings that pair keyboard music from centuries past with contemporary works have been released this year. The first is Jeremy Denk’s “Ligeti/Beethoven” (Nonesuch), which bookends Beethoven’s otherworldly Sonata Opus 111 with György Ligeti’s astringent and electrifying études. The other is “Baroque Conversations” (Sony Classical) by the Jerusalem-born pianist and conductor “David Greilsammer,” who…
The 2013 bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth is fast approaching. The great Italian opera composer first won fame with “Nabucco” (1842), based at several removes on the biblical book of Jeremiah. The stateless Italians of the day saw themselves in the opera’s enslaved Israelites, and the chorus “Va, pensiero” (drawn from Psalm 137) threaded itself…
Strip away the over-the-top visuals and the dialogue in the new trailer for the Cinemax “Strike Back” series and you can hear the first single off Bob Dylan’s forthcoming “Tempest” album. To our ears, the song, “Early Roman Kings,” sounds like a bluesy cross between Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” and “My Wife’s Home Town,” which…
In a thoughtful article published last year, memoirist and novelist André Aciman explored the “pathless Odyssey” around the Mediterranean taken by the song “Naci en Alamo.” Musicians of many different languages and ethnicities, including Yasmin Levy, have taken up this so-called “Song of the Gypsies,” whose origins are disputed and elusive. For Aciman, the ballad…
Austria’s internationally-acclaimed Salzburg Festival opened a new chapter last weekend when it kicked off the first in an annual series of spiritually-themed “Overtures” with concerts featuring selected pieces from the classical canon composed and performed by Jewish musicians. The 10-day addition of religiously-inspired programming to the beginning of the five-week performance calendar in the prominent…
Unlike their pudgy, cherubic, church-tending counterparts, in Jewish mythology angels are not what you’d call angelic. Ominous and conflicted, with a penchant for irony and obscure turns of phrase, they are messages from the personal and collective subconscious for us to wrestle with. These angels create the parameters of our formative and deformative moments. Perhaps…
ייִדישע ליטעראַטן, װאָס האָבן געטרײַ געדינט די קאָמוניסטישע רעזשימען, האָבן גענוצט זײערע פּריװילעגיעס כּדי אָפּצוהיטן ייִדיש.
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