Performing arts: music composition
Ygal Banai (Germany)
studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. He has composed music for some 15
films, winning first prize at the 2003 International Film Festival in Haifa. In 2000, he
composed Neilah, which was
performed by the Jerusalem Chamber Orchestra and broadcast by Israel Radio.
Since then he has also been artistic director of the Safed festival in Israel. His
works have been performed in Italy,
Germany and Austria. Nessiah
is a musical journey which narrates the diverse realities of the European
Disapora – taking his audience to the shtetls and towns of Eastern Europe. It will be performed and recorded at
the Würzburg Academy.
Frédérique Berni
became the agent for Talila and Ben Zimet in 2000, having worked as a
freelance press agent since 1996. In 2002, she embarked on a project
devoted to Jewish and Eastern music, leading to the organization of an
international festival of new Jewish music, Klezmopolitan in 2005. At present she is working on
creating a web-based platform for Jewish and Eastern music, Klezmopolitan. The new album
will reflect the vitality of contemporary Jewish music while creating a
bridge between the past and the future.
Marc Kibrick Bernstein (Varde,
Denmark) is Associate
Professor and Chair of the Rhythmic Music Department at the Danish Academy of Music and Music
Communication. He is currently teaching saxophone, composition, arranging,
improvisation and music history. He is a prolific musician who has
published a number of CDs and has performed extensively. Jewish
PhonicPhoneme is a visually oriented music and sound performance
which will place the audience in the centre of a “multi-sensory theatre”.
It is characterized by an intimate interplay between acoustic and electric
instruments, klezmer, classical chamber music and Jewish jazz, song and the
spoken word, as well as live video and sound design.
Mickaël Charry (Toulouse, France)
was inspired by the radical Jewish culture of John Zorn (and by his label
Tzadik). Charry covers a whole range of contemporary styles (electronic,
rock, expermimental, gypsy jazz). In 2004 he met the leader of Klezmer
Madness, David Krakauer, at a master class of the new-klezmer, who
encouraged Charry to further explore this re-presentation of the
traditional Jewish repertoire from Eastern Europe.
His CD will be released by the JUMU label. Anakronic Electro Orchestra was founded in 2007. A group of young people from Toulouse, the band
builds on klezmer roots, communicating an imaginative recreation of the past. It has a reggae feel
alongside the klezmer clarinet. The CD, Themes Yiddish will
be produced by JUMU, a label which links the past to the present by
grafting electro onto klezmer, combining rap with yiddish clarinet and
mixing the Jewish-Arab tradition with hip-hop.
Amira
Garine (Firenze, Italy) was born
in Graz (Austria)
and studied
piano, violin and composition at the Accademia Musicale Campana and Bar-Ilan University, Israel. In 2003, her
composition Fiori d’Arancio was awarded the first prize at the Young
Composers’ International Competition in Naples. Subsequently, she devoted herself
to the study of folk music. In 2005 she won the City of Salerno Prize for her work on Cilento
folk songs. She currently works at the folk music department of the
Accademia Musicale Campana and teaches harmony and composition at the Paestum Academy of music. Since 2006 she has
also been the artistic director of the Paestum Folk Music Festival. Her
composition, Belcanto Ebraico, is a work for soloists and an
instrumental ensemble inspired by the Jewish experience from chazanut to
the folk chants of different traditions from Georgia,
Bukhara, Italy,
the Balkans and Morocco.
Mark Glanville (London,
UK) studied Classics and
Philosophy at Oxford
University before
winning a scholarship to study singing at the Royal Northern College of
Music. Awards there included the Ricordi Prize for Opera, the Countess of
Munster Award and the Elsie Sykes Fellowship. After a year at the National
Opera Studio in London
he made his debut with Opera North. For the last 15 years he has been cantor
on High Holy Days for Westminster Synagogue in Knightsbridge and given
regular performances of songs from the Yiddish and Hebrew repertoire. A
Yiddishe Winterreise is a programme of songs composed by Alexander
Knapp. It aims to reflect the emotional and physical journey
undertaken by the hero of Schubert's original cycle Die Winterreise. The
specific context is the Holocaust, the performer a badkhen (wedding
singer) who reflects on the destruction of his home and family, and the
consolation of his religion as he escapes through a
winter landscape.
Shtetl Superstars (Berlin,
London) is a new project of Jewish
underground music led by two young musicians, Yuriy Gurzhy (Russendisko, Berlin)
and Lemez Lovas (Oi Va Voi, London).
The album will include titles of the most interesting Jewish groups. Yuriy
Gurzhy (Trikont, Germany) was born in Ukraine and currently lives in Berlin. He is a
musician, DJ, producer and a presenter of a radio programme. With Wladimir
Kaminer, he launched the popular “Russendisko” and recorded four CDs. Lemez Lovas is a Londoner of Ukrainian
extraction. He is a musician (OiVaVoi) and DJ (Radio Gagarin), a radio
journalist and composer of film and theatre music. He is currently working
on a book about the Franco-Algerian pianist Maurice El Medioni.
Sylvie Sivann (Capharnaoum,
France) won a first prize for singing at
the Rubin Academy
in Jerusalem.
Returning to Brussels, she founded
Leporello, a musical theatre company, and toured Belgium with Hertz and Schmerz. In Paris,
together with Gerard Grobman, she started Cie Capharnaum. In 1997 she
released her first album, Playsound.
She has performed with her sextet at festivals of World and Sacred Music. The recording of Du côté de chez Sivann will
include Jewish songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, showcasing
little-known material. The collection aims to re-locate this music in a
contemporary context with arrangements by Christian Mesmin and
Pierre Wekstein.
Visual arts: exhibitions of new work
Katy Beinart (Oxford, UK) studied architecture and development
practices at UCL and Oxford
Brookes University.
Her artistic practice combines public art, architecture, and education to examine themes of history, identity
and place. Much of her work is research based and site-specific, and
evolves through a participatory process. She uses architectural
representations including map-making and drawing, photography and
digital/analogue film. Her proposed work, The Gift: Origination
will explore how one’s own identity and sense of place is created, in comparison with (and informed by) previous
generations. Her goal is to create a 'map', or series of drawings, which
explore the journeys made by her great-grandparents and grandparents,
combining cartographies and classifications with narratives of desire and
loss of identity.
Michael Bensman
was born in Moscow in 1957, where
he studied architecture. He moved to Germany
and worked on a variety of projects in Berlin, taking part in many exhibitions
and presentations at international art festivals. He is particularly
interested in graphic arts and art books. His new project, Personal record n° 3, about the
Fisherman and a Fish, is a
study of the textual and symbolic significance of the fish in the Torah and
in the New Testament.
Ronald George Golz’s 1998 installation Just
stop! converted a bus-stop shelter on the Kurfürstenstraße in
Berlin-Schöneberg into a permanent reminder of the site of Eichmann's
'Jewish Department'. In 2004, he was a finalist of the Jewish Artist of the
Year Award (JAYA) at the Ben Uri Gallery in London with The silent caretaker.
His other works include Jewish and
Gentile Basketball - An installation (1999); Synagoga and Synagogue (and their Protectors) - a Photomontage
(2000). His new project with the
group Meshulash is entitled Erwählung
(God’s Choice) and will use a variety of media: painting, photography,
collages, sculptures and installation.
Celestial Jerusalem, terrestrial Jerusalem, visions of an eternal
esthetics
is a group exhibition presenting the work of four Russian artists. Based in
New York, Paris
and Jerusalem,
together they develop their aesthetic vision around a single source of
inspiration. Figurative painting for Vera Gutnika and Vladimir Kara,
photography for Gueorgui Pinkhassov, sculpture and installation for Julia
Nitsberg, each artist bases its work on the history of Jerusalem and its spiritual dimension. Vera
Gutnika is a pupil of the famous Soviet artist Vladimir Shtranick. In
1988, she received a grant from the Ministry for Education and Culture of
Israel, and went to Paris
to study painting. She has exhibited her work in Israel and abroad. In her
paintings, the boundaries between the object, the image and the background
disappear and the painting becomes alive with the rhythm of lines and explosive
colours. Vladimir Kara has exhibited at the French Institute in Florence, the Cocteau Museum
and Museo d' Arte Contemporanea (Pecci).
His works have been shown at the Inter
Art Gallery
(New York), the Gallery Modevormgeving (The Hague) and the Gallery Aderes Ufer (Berlin). He has
created stage sets and costumes for several European theatres and also
wrote and directed the film Genia
Polyakov - ballet master, choreographer (2004). Julia Nitsberg has taken part in
individual and collective shows in New York,
Harbor Cultural Center
and Newhouse. She graduated from the Parsons School of Design of New York. She produced sculptures and multi-media
installations and mural drawings
exploring a wide range of political and socio-cultural subjects.
Geyorgui Pinkhassov studied photography at the School
of Cinema in Moscow. In 1978, he joined the Union of the Graphic Arts. The same year, the film
director Andrei Tarkovski involved him in the filming of Stalker. In 1988 Pinkhassov joined
the Magnum agency in Paris
and covered events for the international press (Géo, Libération, Stern and the NewYork Times Magazine). In his
photography, he uses lighting and angles, which bring his work close to
abstraction.
Gergely Laszlo (Budapest,
Hungary) is a
photographer, artist, curator and president of the Lumen Foundation in Hungary
which works to popularize and support the work of art photographers and
video artists. He has exhibited in prestigious galleries in Budapest as well as internationally (Russia, UK,
Slovenia, Croatia, Germany). In his photo project
entitled Kibbutz Yad Hanna he plans to portray the history of a small
and dwindling kibbutz in Israel
founded by members of Hashomer Hatzair, many of whom were Hungarian. This
project hopes to prevent the hitherto unexamined history of Yad Hanna from
falling into oblivion.
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