Mar. 12, 2020 Alicia Svigals & Patrick Farrell play Kostakowsky


Klezmer Workshop 6:30pm   $25 per class
Concerts & Dance Parties begin at 8:00pm* 
(note earlier starting time!)– $15
Jam Session follows Concert
Full night pass – $35 (includes Workshop, Concert & Jam Session)

at The Town & Village Synagogue, Social Hall,  334 East 14th St.(between 1st & 2nd Ave.)

Alicia Svigals & Patrick Farrell play Kostakowsky
When Wolff “Nat” Kostakowsky published his collection “International Hebrew Wedding Music” in New York in 1916, the music of the professional Eastern European klezmorim was already well established on American soil. In order to satisfy the evolving tastes and various emigration origins of the Ashkenazic Jewish communities in the New World, immigrant wedding musicians had long since been adding new material to their already extensive repertoires, and klezmer music in America had taken on its own flavor and style. Kostakowsky’s book is the first and largest collection that we yet know of which attempted to create a klezmer “fake book” – an on-the-job reference for professional musicians playing Jewish weddings in New York and the surrounding regions in the second decade of the 20th-century. Included in the collection of over 270 melodies, alongside beautiful and (today) rarely played freylakhs, shers, dobridens and khusidls is an extensive repertoire of bulgars, sirbas, hongas and Romanian horas, Polish mazurkas, polkas and obereks, Hungarian csardas, Russian kozakhs, Ukrainian kolomeykes, waltzes, marches and early Zionist songs. In short, almost everything a professional band would need to please their heterogeneous public at a New World wedding 100 years ago.Violinist Alicia Svigals and accordionist Patrick Farrell present an evening exploring and uncovering the multi-faceted treasures of the Kostakowsky collection. Longtime collaborators, both as a duo and in Alicia Svigals’ Klezmer Fiddle Express, their countless hours together on 21st-century wedding bandstands, festivals and concert stages provide the background for an exciting and virtuosic evening of listening and dancing to old-New-World klezmer music.

Alicia Svigals (violinist and composer) is the world’s leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Klezmatics. She has performed with and written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, Debbie Friedman, Osvaldo Golijov, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, filmmaker Judith Helfand, poet Allen Ginsberg and many others. Her live silent film scoring projects, the award-winning The Yellow Ticket and her new score, The Ancient Law (co-composed with Donald Sosin) are touring the world to acclaim. Her CD Fidl (1996) reawakened klezmer fiddle tradition. Her newest CD is Beregovski Suite: Klezmer Reimagined, with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer – an original take on long-lost Jewish music from Ukraine.

Patrick Farrell is an accordionist, composer and bandleader from the USA living in Berlin. His ongoing projects include newly composed Yiddish song duets with singer Sveta Kundish and chamber-folk ensemble Ljova and the Kontraband. Past projects include the celebrated avant/traditionalist klezmer ensemble Yiddish Art Trio, unique and unusual duets with New York trumpeter Ben Holmes, and the acclaimed and much-loved Stagger Back Brass Band. Farrell has appeared on dozens of recordings from many different musical genres, including with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, Adrienne Cooper, and Never Enough Hope. He has studied accordion in Macedonia, Serbia, Germany and Romania, and has played in clubs, concert halls, streets, and serenades all over North America and Europe.
www.pattysounds.com