Jewish Music Festival Cincinnati Concert 1
Yiddish Vocal Chamber Music Lecture Recital
Date: Sunday, March 3rd, 2024
Time: 1:30pm lecture; 3:00pm recital
Venue: First Lutheran Church
1208 Race St, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Helen Medwedeff Greenberg: Froyen Shtimme
I. Ikh Hob a Shvalb Gezen (I Have Seen a Swallow)
II. Mit a Nar (With a Fool)
III. Dremlen Feygl (Drowsing Birds)
IV. Vayber (Wives)
V. Kh ‘shtey in der Mitogtsayt (I Stand in the Midday)
Samantha Stinson, soprano
Diana Chubak, piano
Alex Weiser: and all the days were purple
I. Mayn Glik
II. *
III. I was never able to pray
IV. Benkshaft
V. Poezye
VI. Lines for Winter
VII. **
VIII. Mir zaynen gegangen durkh teg
Samantha Stinson, soprano
Diana Chubak, piano
Yasmine Bougacha, violin
Jiho Chung, viola
Joshua Bermudez, cello
Jacob Ottmer, percussion
Program Description
Yiddish song is a primary source of Jewish oral tradition and history. The Ashkenazi dialect of Yiddish emerged in the 9th century and knit the community together through a thousand years of displacement. Once considered a dying language in the face of American assimilation, Yiddish has experienced a flourishing renaissance over the past few decades, with third-generation American Jews at the helm. Join Alex Weiser, composer and Samantha Stinson, soprano, for a conversation on the re-emergence and reinvention of this language through song, opera, and theater, followed by a concert of Helen Medwedeff Greenberg’s Froyen Shtimme (Women’s Voices) and Alex Weiser’s and all the days were purple.
Program Notes
Froyen Shtimme
Helen Medwedeff Greenberg (1939-2011) wrote a large amount of secular as well as sacred music, with a focus on lieder in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. Her song cycle Froyen Shtimme (Women’s Voices) premiered in 1994. The cycle features five 20th century female Yiddish writers – Dora Teitelbaum, Malka Heifetz Tussman, Leah Rudnitzki, Berta Kling, and Rachel Korn. The songs deliberately vary between somber, cheerful, devastating, wry, and seductive text and tones to convey the multi-faceted experiences lived by women at that time. The songs also reflect the variety of Yiddish diction and styles that was the inevitable result of shtetl and ghetto expulsion and waves of immigration to North America and the Soviet Union during the beginning and middle of the 20th century, respectively. Greenberg’s compositional style evokes at different turns Poulenc’s cabaret songs, Ravel’s quirky prosody, Richard Strauss’s richly textured chords, and Brahms’s sweeping rubato phrases.
Froyen Shtimme (translation)
I. IKH HOB A SHVALB GEZEN (I Have Seen A Swallow)
Poem by: Dora Teitelbaum
I have seen a swallow in flight.
I thought it would fly there forever.
I saw a rose in full bloom
And thought it would always flower.
I saw a tree in the meadow.
And I thought it would always flourish.
I once spun a dream
Which I thought would never vanish.
I am the swallow with the wounded breast,
The tree bent low by storms,
The flower plucked from the bush,
The dream with eyes worn out from longing.
Deep in my heart a wind cries,
With seven anguished howls.
But I am trusting like a child,
And am ready, still ready to love.
II. MIT A NAR (With A Fool)
Poem: Malka Heifetz Tussman
Culture–
What does a fool do with culture?
What does a cultured fool do?
With culture, he can destroy the world.
And strange–I can’t be clever with a fool.
I become more foolish than he is.
I dread a fool,
and have no idea
How he attached himself to me–
The fool.
III. DREMLIN FEYGL (Drowsing Birds)
Poem: Leah Rudnitzky
Birds doze on the branches,
Sleep, my precious child.
By your cradle in your nest
A stranger sits and sings:
Lyu, Lyu…
Here your cradle had its dwelling
Woven with joy,
And your mother, Oh, your mother,
Never returns.
Lyu, Lyu.
I have seen your father running
Under a hail of stone,
His desolate cry
Flying over fields.
Lyu, Lyu…
IV. VAYBER (Wives)
Poem: Berta Kling
What do wives do, What do wives do
In the evening?
Sit on benches, sit on benches
One observing the other.
They sit, they sit,
Their gazes wander;
They look, they ponder
One about the other.
One looks, one looks
At another and thinks:
It’s not in her cards
To have my fate.
Another, another observes
A pretty woman;
And she thinks, and she thinks
Of her thus:
Would she, would she
Be so radiant
If she had, if she had
A husband like mine?
V. ‘KH’SHTEH IN DER MITTOGSAYT (I Stand in the Midday)
Poem: Rachel Korn
I stand in the midday of your life
a stalk bent in fullness,
no longer wearing the green of June,
growing in golden certainty of days to come.
The wind stirs lilac bells in far off meadows.
Summer has the bitter scent of wild poppies,
of steamy earth,
and of my hair.
And when day puts up her blond hair in braids
and evening gathers pearls of dew,
my brown body falls at your feet,
a stalk breaking before the harvester.
and all the days were purple
In her poem yorn, Yiddish poet Anna Margolin reflects back on her life, and closes by speaking directly to God ending with the line: “un zukhn dir, nit gloybndik in dir” – “and seeking you, not believing in you.” This poem, as well as the poems included in this work, can be understood as kinds of secular prayers. Each deals in some way with the meaning and shape of life, embracing its joy while trying to make sense of its difficulties and transience. Many of my favorite poems are like little talismans or amulets – each a kernel of wisdom that I carry through life because they provide for me something to hold on to in the face of life’s challenges and transience – each poem a way of seeking God without believing in God.
and all the days were purple features a collection of such gems in Yiddish and English from poets Anna Margolin, Edward Hirsch, Rachel Korn, Abraham Sutzkever, and Mark Strand. The cycle is bookended with two songs setting Anna Margolin poems that act as a kind of prelude and postlude. Each Anna Margolin poem reflects on life from the perspective of being after or outside of it. Instrumental sections separate these two songs from the four others, which reflect on life from within its tumult, longing, beauty, and difficulty.
and all the days were purple (translation)
I. Mayn Glik
Anna Margolin, Translation by Shirley Kumove
Perhaps this was my happiness:
to feel how your eyes
bowed down before me.
No, rather this was my happiness:
to go silently back and forth
across the square with you.
No, not even that, but listen:
how over our joy
there hovered the smiling face of death.
And all of the days were purple
and all were hard.
III. I was never able to pray
Edward Hirsch
Wheel me down to the shore
where the lighthouse was abandoned
and the moon tolls in the rafters.
Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
like the forgotten faces of the dead.
I was never able to pray,
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves
and then stare into the dome
of a sky that never ends
and see my voice sail into the night.
IV. Benkshaft
Longing
Rachel Korn, Translation by Ruth Whitman
My dreams are so full of longing
that every morning
my body smells of you –
and on my bitten lip there slowly dries
the only sign of suffering,
a speck of blood.
And the hours like goblets pour hope,
one into the other,
like expensive wine:
that you’re not far away,
that now, at any moment,
you may come, come, come.
V. Poezye
Poetry
Abraham Sutzkever, Translation by Chana Bloch
A dark violet plum,
the last one on the tree,
thin-skinned and delicate as the pupil of an eye,
that in the dew at night blots out
love, visions, shivering,
and then at the morning star the dew
grows weightless:
That is poetry. Touch it so lightly
that you don’t leave a fingerprint
VI. Lines for Winter
Mark Strand
for Ros Krauss
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
VIII. Mir zaynen gegangen durkh teg
Anna Margolin, Translation by Shirley Kumove
We went through the days as through storm-tossed gardens.
Blossoming, maturing; mastering the game of life and death.
Clouds, vastness, and dreams were in our words.
Among stubborn trees in a rustling summer garden
we fused into a single tree.
Evenings spread their deeply darkened blue,
with the aching desire of winds and falling stars,
with shifting, caressing glow of fluttering leaves and grasses,
we wove ourselves into the wind, merged with the blueness
like happy creatures and clever, playful gods.
Samantha Stinson (she/her) maintains a diverse career as a performer, cantorial soloist, and educator. Hailed for her “loving sincerity and magnificent voice” (Petoskey News Review) and “rounded, commanding top” (Broadway in Chicago), she has sung with Opera Viva (UK), Cincinnati Opera Education, Delaware Valley Opera Teatre, Opera for the Young, Queen City Chamber Opera, the Carnegie Theatre of KY, and Chicago Verismo Opera, among others. Her favorite roles performed include Violetta in La Traviata, Adele in Die Fledermaus, Musetta in La bohème, Lily in The Secret Garden, Miss Andrew in Mary Poppins, Mabel in Pirates of Penzance, and Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro. Her symphonic work includes Orff’s Carmina Burana, Handel’s Messiah, Mozart’s Requiem, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasie and Symphony No. 9, and Tommasini’s Three Spanish Songs.
Samantha has consistently found ways to merge her performance career with her deeply held Jewish faith. She compiled and performed an Anthology of Yiddish Art Song as her doctoral dissertation project at the University of Cincinnati – CCM. She was the original soloist for Jose Vargas’ The Story of Chanukah with the Cape Cod Symphony. She is currently a Cantorial Intern with the Cantor’s Assembly, working towards ordination. Her cantorial style vacillates between traditional Ashkenazic melodies, contemporary songs, and world music arrangements of beloved prayers. Sammi especially enjoys introducing and teaching exciting yet unfamiliar melodies to her congregation at Temple Shalom NWA.
In addition to her performance career, Samantha serves on the Learning and Engagement team at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, AR, where she and her team welcome over 25,000 children per year to experience professional live theater. Living in this region has inspired her current musical writing project, a one-woman show titled Little Jew in the Ozarks. Learn more at www.samanthastinson.com
Alex Weiser
Broad gestures and rich textures are hallmarks of the “compelling” (The New York Times), “deliciously wistful” (San Francisco Classical Voice), music of composer Alex Weiser. Born and raised in New York City, Weiser creates acutely cosmopolitan music combining a deeply felt historical perspective with a vibrant forward-looking creativity hailed as “personal, expressive, and bold” (I Care If You Listen).
Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and cited as “a meditative and deeply spiritual work whose unexpected musical language is arresting and directly emotional.” Released by Cantaloupe Music in April 2019, the album includes songs in Yiddish and English.
Active as an opera composer, Weiser is currently working on two operas. Tevye’s Daughters, written with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, is a commission from American Lyric Theater. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s iconic Yiddish stories, it explores the tragic death of Tevye’s lesser-known daughter, Shprintse. The opera also traces the lasting impact of Shprintse’s fate on her sisters who are now elderly and living in New York. The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan is set in 1950s post-war New York and follows linguist Yudel Mark as he sets out to write the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary — an effort of linguistic preservation, and a memorial to the dead.
An advocate for contemporary classical music, Weiser co-founded Kettle Corn New Music, an “ever-enjoyable” concert series (The New York Times), and was a director of the MATA Festival, “the city’s leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers” (The New Yorker). Weiser is now the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he curates programs and has commissioned over fifteen works from some of today’s leading composers. Visit www.AlexWeiser.com for more information.
Broad gestures and rich textures are hallmarks of the “compelling” (The New York Times), “deliciously wistful” (San Francisco Classical Voice), music of composer Alex Weiser. Born and raised in New York City, Weiser creates acutely cosmopolitan music combining a deeply felt historical perspective with a vibrant forward-looking creativity hailed as “personal, expressive, and bold” (I Care If You Listen).
Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and cited as “a meditative and deeply spiritual work whose unexpected musical language is arresting and directly emotional.” Released by Cantaloupe Music in April 2019, the album includes songs in Yiddish and English.
Active as an opera composer, Weiser is currently working on two operas. Tevye’s Daughters, written with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, is a commission from American Lyric Theater. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s iconic Yiddish stories, it explores the tragic death of Tevye’s lesser-known daughter, Shprintse. The opera also traces the lasting impact of Shprintse’s fate on her sisters who are now elderly and living in New York. The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan is set in 1950s post-war New York and follows linguist Yudel Mark as he sets out to write the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary — an effort of linguistic preservation, and a memorial to the dead.
An advocate for contemporary classical music, Weiser co-founded Kettle Corn New Music, an “ever-enjoyable” concert series (The New York Times), and was a director of the MATA Festival, “the city’s leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers” (The New Yorker). Weiser is now the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he curates programs and has commissioned over fifteen works from some of today’s leading composers. Visit www.AlexWeiser.com for more information.
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