ENCORE: Zing Mir A Lidele!/זינג מיר אַ לידעלע!/ Sing Me a Song in Yiddish!

with Cantor Stewart Figa, accompanied by Ilya Levinson and Ronnie Kuller

Yiddish song and performance encompasses every aspect of Ashkenazi Jewish life and culture from the past several hundred years. Flowering to its height in the earlier half of the 20th Century, Yiddish song and theatre expressed joy and sadness, religious piety and secular everyday life, political struggles and romantic love, sublime poetry and raucous humor, persecution and nostalgia. Stewart Figa brings to life a repertoire of classics and oddities of Yiddish song that he has built up in an over nearly 40 year career in Jewish music.

Cantor Stewart Figa has served at West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest Illinois since 1998 and has been a Cantor in the Chicago area since 1990. He is a founding member of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, an ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago dedicated to reviving European Jewish music from the first half of the 20th century. With that group he toured in Vienna and Berlin and has frequently appeared in New York City at venues including Symphony Space, The Center for Jewish History, and the Neue Gallerie. He has also performed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and for the Chicago Humanities Festival. Mr. Figa performed for several seasons in Yiddish Theatre productions in New York City where he had the privilege of working with some of the legendary greats of the Yiddish stage including Leon Liebgold, Seymour Rexite, Reizel Boyzk and Max Perlman.

Ilya Levinson, music director, arranger, and pianist, holds degrees in composition from the Moscow Conservatory and the University of Chicago. His works for chamber music and orchestra have recently enjoyed performances in France, Germany, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His Klezmer Rhapsody is recorded by the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band on the Shanachie label. Composer-in-residence with American Music Festivals, he is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia College Chicago.

Ronnie Kuller, on accordian, is a composer, arranger, pianist and accordionist who has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Joffrey Ballet, the Chicago Philharmonic, and Mister Tom Musick, and whose compositions have been performed at Ear Taxi Festival and recorded onto wax cylinder at Edison National Historical Park. Ronnie is a co-developer and music director for Her Only Light, a set of new arrangements of the art and folk songs of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse for chamber ensemble, with interdisciplinary performer Emmy Bean. Ronnie lives in Chicago with her wonderful husband Patrick and amazing daughter Sylvie.

Please register to receive the zoom link. You can also attend at Temple Har Zion, 1040 North Harlem Avenue River Forest, IL 60305