Yiddish at Moscow Philarmonic

On April 15, 2023, the Russian National Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of the world-famous conductor and violinist Vladimir Spivakov conducted a concert at the Rachmaninov Concert Hall of the Moscow State Academic Philharmonic. The program included Dmitri Shostakovich’s chamber symphony “In Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War,” Isaac Schwartz’s concerto for orchestra “Yellow Stars” and Iván Fischer’s German-Jewish cantata for soprano, trumpet and orchestra, which includes a lullaby and an aria in Yiddish.

Ivan Fischer (born 1951) is a renowned Hungarian conductor, the founder and music director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and an outstanding composer. His German-Jewish cantata is associated with an interesting fact of his family history: a poem by Goethe is carved on the grave of the composer’s uncle who is buried at the Jewish cemetery of Budapest.

Another source of Fischer’s inspiration is the tragic fate of the Jews. According to the composer, he once read a very touching Yiddish poem by Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010) dedicated to his mother who was killed along with other relatives. The then young Avrom miraculously managed to save himself. When the murderers left, he put on his mother’s clothes so that he could still feel her loving warmth…

Despite the terrible contradiction between Jewish and German culture during the Holocaust, Ashkenazi Jews and Germans have a lot in common, including their related languages. That is why in Fischer’s musical “collage” the words of a Jewish folk song and Sutzkever’s tragic poem alternate with the works of Rilke and Goethe.

Sugihara Concert at Carnegie Hall

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and the American Society for Yad Vashem announced the American premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, “Vessels of Light,” which will take place on April 19th, 2023, at Carnegie Hall. Auerbach’s monumental work includes words of several great Yiddish poets: Yisroel Emyot, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Manger, Peretz Markish, Avrom Sutzkever, Moyshe Teyf, Reyzl Zhikhlinski, and others.

The evening’s master of ceremonies will be Zalman Mlotek, who is also the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York. Yevgeny Kissin, a famed piano virtuoso and a contemporary Yiddish poet, helped to choose the poems and translated some of the Yiddish text into English for the symphony.

Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Jewish Austrian and American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist who wrote in her official statement: “I chose Yiddish poetry for the libretto – as a tribute to the Yiddish language”. According to Auerbach, the title of the work, Vessels of Light, stems from the mystical Kabbalistic concept of “broken vessels”.

The world-renowned Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper who inspired Auerbach to write the work, will be performing at Carnegie Hall as a soloist, together with the New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Constantine Orbelian.

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania who saved up to 6,000 Jewish refugees during WWII. It has been estimated that as many as 100,000 people alive today are descendants of those who were saved from the Holocaust thanks to Sugihara’s visas.