Hagar Sharvit / Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg

A panorama of Jewish culture in Europe

The programme presents a wide variety of songs that reflect Jewish music and poetry through the prism of the art song. Songs by Israeli composers; folk songs; cabaret; music that was composed and sung in concentration camps; political songs written in exile; German and French composers who drew inspiration from Jewish themes or who set works by Jewish poets to music; a contemporary setting of poetry that addresses current perspectives of Jews in Germany; and interrelationships between the German art song and Yiddish folk song – a panorama of Jewish culture in Europe and the diversity of its expressive forms. The two artists – a third-generation Israeli mezzosoprano with Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Polish and German roots and a German-Jewish pianist and poet of post-Soviet ancestry – present the results of their artistic research into their own identity and culture.