MELODEON presents Soprano Marti Newland in 'Music of the American Jewish Diaspora' Sunday, January 12, 2014 at 7:30 p.m., 122 West 69th Street, NYC

Yiddish writers Bialik, Ben Ami, Sholem Alechem, Sholem Yankev Abramovich (Mendele)

Marti Newland

www.martinewland.com

Preservation and Engagement
from Yiddish Art Song to the Gershwins

Sunday, JANUARY 12th, 2014 at 7:30 p.m.

Christ & Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church, NYC‎
122 West 69th Street – between Broadway and Amsterdam

Marti Newland, soprano
George Spitzer, baritone
Artis Wodehouse, antique reed organ and piano

Admission: $20, General; $15 Students and Seniors
Tickets online:

https://www.vendini.com/ticketLine/ITL/?w=3da97b317db95113426982f1ba8d5ee1&t=tix&theme=ticketLine25
 

PROGRAM:

 

Consolations for reed organ by Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894).  This great Jewish composer never came to the United States, but his music influenced a whole generation and more of Jewish/American composers.

 

Lazar Weiner Yiddish Art Songs and piano music (1897-1982). Lazar Weiner is considered the greatest composer of Yiddish Art Songs.  He immigrated to the US from Russia to escape the persecution that had become increasingly virulent persecution of that period.  Resettlement was a traumatic experience, and to cope with that, Weiner recreated his Yiddish roots in musical collaboration with a new generation of similarly displaced Yiddish poets in America.

            Prelude from Three Pieces for Piano
            O’er the Fields 1918
            Yosl the Fiddler
            A Nigun ca. 1930
            Monotone 1923
            Passacaglia from Calculations for solo piano 1938
            A Beard 1945
            Slow and dreamy from Calculations 1938
            I Believe 1946
 

Richard Danielpour (b. 1956), Love Triptych for soprano from his opera, “Margaret Garner”. Danielpour is born of Persian/Jewish descent, but following in the great tradition begun by George Gershwin, Danielpour’s first opera deals with racial injustice visited upon African Americans. Together with librettist/poet Toni Morrison, “Margaret Garner” deals with a seminal and horrific incident in the antebellum South that spurred the abolitionist movement forward toward eradicating slavery.

            Margaret’s Lullaby
            A Quality of Love
            Intermezzo

Selections from Strike Up the Band (1927) and Let ‘em Eat Cake (1933) by George and Ira Gershwin. Overshadowed by the great Depression ,and  the disastrous rise of the Nazis, the Gershwin brothers engaged artistically with their perilous time, exposing its dangers, uncertainties and absurdities in two tough satirical musicals.

            Wintergreen for President
            Mine
            Blue, Blue, Blue
            Who Cares? from the Gershwin Songbook for solo piano
            Union Square