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Summer Yiddish Song Celebration

Wednesday Aug 2, 2017 6:00pm
Uriel Weinreich Zumer Program Concert

Admission: $15
YIVO members & students: $10

Watch the video

View the evening’s program.


A concert in celebration of the rich breadth of music with Yiddish lyrics including Yiddish Theater Songs, Yiddish Folk Songs, and Yiddish Art Songs. Singers include Eléonore Biezunski, Miryem-Khaye Seigel, and Eliza Bagg.


About the Performers

Dedicated to performing and developing new work, Brooklyn-based soprano Eliza Bagg has worked closely on projects with a number of prominent and emerging composers including John Zorn, Michael Gordon, Chris Cerrone, Judd Greenstein, Bill Britelle, Amy Beth Kirsten, Olga Bell, and Emily Hall, among others. Her '16-'17 season includes John Zorn's Commedia dell'Arte at the Guggenheim, Infinite Palette's presentation of electro-acoustic art songs by Bill Britelle, Missy Mazzoli, and Daniel Wohl at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Claire Chases's Density Project at The Kitchen, an excerpt from Michael Gordon's Van Gogh with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a presentation of Hildegard Von Bingen chant at The Met Museum with Jacqueline Horner of Anonymous 4, and a performance of David Lang's Death Speaks, along with numerous collaborative projects with emerging composers and premieres of new works written specifically for her. Bagg has been noted for her unique sound and artistry, having had her "haunting vocals" compared by Pitchfork to "a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy.” www.elizabagg.com

Photo by Jack Toolin

Eléonore Biezunski is a singer, violinist and archivist. She was trained in classical violin, klezmer music, Yiddish song and voice. She has collected Yiddish songs and melodies between Paris and New York, where she has founded or joined groups (Shpilkes, The Klezmographers, Shtetl Stompers, Les Égarés and Yerushe), written plays (“La Complainte du Balluchon”, “Le Petit Peuple de Ruth Rubin”) or joined theater companies, to which she lends her voice and her bow and plays a little comedy (Cie La Courte Échelle; Der Lufteater; Cie 0,10). She released her second album "Yerushe" in 2016, drawing from the Ruth Rubin Collection and other Yiddish music archives. Her first album “Zol zayn” came out in 2014 with the band Shpilkes. When she is not on stage, she teaches (Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Workmen's Circle, Institut Européen des Musiques Juives), hosts a radio show about “Zing!” on the online Radio "Yiddish Pour Tous” and serves as Sound Archivist in the the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (NYC), where she prepares, alongside Lorin Sklamberg the publication of the Ruth Rubin Collection online. She is a 2017 recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts' Folk Art Apprenticeships (for the study of Yiddish Folksongs with Josh Waletzky) through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. She published an article about Yiddish Songs about New York "East Side Story. Mémoires sédimentées de l’expérience migratoire juive à New York à travers une chanson yiddish", in. Marianne Amar, Hélène Bertheleu, Laure Teulières (dirs.), Mémoires des migrations, temps de l'histoire, Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, Paris, 2015. When she was in Paris, she was the Assistant of Hervé Roten at the European Institute for Jewish Music, where she participated in the publication of a 6-CD set "Jewish Music in Paris in the Aftermath of WWII", Eds. E. Biezunski, L. Couderc & H. Roten, Éditions de l'Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, Paris, 2015. Her website: www.eleonorebiezunski.com

Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, and researcher in the field of Yiddish culture. A fluent Yiddish speaker, Miryem-Khaye has performed, lectured and taught throughout North America and in Poland and Australia. She's appeared frequently with the Folksbiene (National Yiddish Theater) and Hankus Netsky's Hebrew National Salvage, and shared the stage with many luminaries of the Yiddish and klezmer scene. Her research project “The Broder Singers: Forerunners of the Yiddish Theater” received the 2011-2012 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Toyznt tamen = A thousand flavors is her first solo album. www.amks.wordpress.com