Ghetto Tango, Los Angeles, CA, 16 Jan Jan 2009
SHABBAT FARBRENGEN
Ghetto Tango w/Adrienne Cooper & Zalmen Mlotek
Friday, January 16, 2008
8:00 p.m. in Lopaty Chapel
Led by Cantor Herschel Fox
Kabbalat Shabbat
& Festive Oneg
15739 Ventura Boulevard
Encino, CA 91436
(818) 788-6000 Web site: www.vbs.org
In the Jewish ghettos of Poland and Lithuania during World War II, a world of dislocation, terror and death, cabaret music thrived. Jewish audiences gathered in makeshift clubs and theaters to hear newly-created Yiddish songs, rooted in Jewish folk and liturgical music as well as European operetta, American ragtime and Argentine tango.Jewish performers tuned these cosmopolitan songs in a local key: satirical and elegiac, political and personal, angry and heartsick.Together they created something rare, scarcely conceivable: art at the edge of the abyss.
Adrienne Cooper, one of the world's most acclaimed singers of Yiddish vocal music, and Zalmen Mlotek, a leading figure in Yiddish musical theater, here present ghetto songs collected during and after the war.