Yiddish song recital

Villa Seligmann invites you to a Yiddish song recital with Tehila Nini Goldstein (soprano) and Jascha Nemtsov (piano and moderation).

The program combines top-class vocal works in Yiddish by three Eastern European Jewish composers. Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw and fled from the German troops to the Soviet Union in 1939, where he spent the rest of his life. His entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Joseph Achron came from a shtetl in what is now Lithuania, he studied in Warsaw and St. Petersburg and finally emigrated to the USA in 1925. Moshe Milner grew up in a traditional Yiddish-speaking environment in what is now Ukraine. He went down in music history as the author of the first Yiddish opera “Di himlen brenen”, which premiered in 1923 and was banned by the Soviet censors after two performances.
The program focuses on Weinberg’s two Yiddish vocal cycles, which will be performed for the first time in a new, corrected text version. The existing publications based on Cyrillic transcription contained numerous errors and inaccuracies. The corrected version was produced by two luminaries of Yiddish music, the singer and poet Efim Chorny and the composer Evgeny Khazdan.

Artists and artists

The pianist and musicologist Jascha Nemtsov was born in Magadan (Russia) in 1963. He graduated from the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. He has lived in Germany since 1992. Nemtsov was appointed Professor of the History of Jewish Music at the Franz Liszt University of Music Weimar in 2013. He is also Academic Director of the Cantor Training Program at the Abraham Geiger College Potsdam and a member of the Institute for Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam. As a pianist, he performs worldwide as a soloist and with chamber music partners. He has recorded more than 40 CDs to date, including numerous premiere recordings of works by Jewish composers. In 2007 he received the German Record Critics’ Award and in 2018 the OPUS KLASSIK Award.

The Israeli singer Tehila Nini Goldstein and Jascha Nemtsov have been working together for fifteen years now. Their first joint project was the rediscovery of the outstanding German-Jewish composer Jakob Schönberg with the double CD Another Schönberg, which attracted a great deal of international attention. The two musicians share an interest in Jewish music of the 20th century. Described as a singer with immense expression and a warmly timbred voice, she is a versatile musician with a broad repertoire in both the soprano and mezzo-soprano repertoire. Her musical interests range from early baroque and folk music to pieces of contemporary music, some of which are specially composed for her individual vocal abilities. She enjoys switching constantly between opera, song and chamber music repertoire.

The event is part of the exhibition “Rubinstein as a guest of Seligmann”. The exhibition can be viewed before the event.