Night Songs from a Neighboring Village: Ballads of the Ukrainian & Yiddish Heartland

Presented by YIVO, CJH and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance

Night Songs from a Neighboring Village is a concert program pairing two musical traditions—East European Jewish and Ukrainian—that have existed side by side and nourished each other for centuries. Master musicians Michael Alpert and Julian Kytasty draw on Ukrainian folk and liturgical song, and the art of the bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp), as well as three Jewish musical genres that reached their greatest European flowering in Ukraine: klezmer music, Yiddish folk song and the music of the Hasidic world. Night Songs from a Neighboring Village includes performance, personal storytelling and commentary, and has been featured at major concert venues in Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Berlin, Krakow and elsewhere throughout the US and Europe.

Alpert and Kytasty add: “We are musicians/composers from Jewish and Ukrainian communities in North America for whom the affirmation and development of our musical heritages is a life's work. Our collaboration explores the deep historical and cultural links between our two peoples, who arrived on North American shores in the same great waves of immigration from the same ancestral territory. Devoted to our own musical legacies, we have been inspired to explore the commonalities that connect us as well as the differences that have divided us.”

About the Performers

Michael Alpert (violin, accordion, voice), a pioneering and innovative figure in the renaissance of East European Jewish klezmer music and Yiddish culture for 35 years, is internationally known for his award-winning performances and recordings with Brave Old World, Kapelye, David Krakauer, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, Frank London and The Klezmatics, Socalled, salsa legend Larry Harlow and others. A native Yiddish speaker, he is considered the finest traditional Yiddish singer of his generation, and is noted as well for his original Yiddish songs. Alpert's appearances include concert venues throughout North America, Europe, Israel and Australia. An important bridge between Old World musicians and the world klezmer/Yiddish revitalization, Alpert has extensively documented and researched traditional Jewish music and dance worldwide and continues to direct and teach internationally at Yiddish cultural programs. He is a 2015 NEA National Heritage Fellowship recipient.

Julian Kytasty (banduras, voice, sopilka) is one of the world's premier bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp) players, and the instrument's leading North American exponent. A multi-instrumentalist and third-generation bandurist who learned most of his early repertoire from his family, he has concertized and taught Ukrainian instrumental and choral music to thousands of students at summer music camps and workshops throughout the Americas and Europe. In 1989-1990 Kytasty was one of the first North American-born bandurists to tour Ukraine, performing over one hundred concerts. He is especially recognized for his expertise in Ukrainian liturgical music and his historical research on the bandura and kobzar epic song repertoires. A consummate exponent of time-honored folk styles, he is known also for his original compositions, innovative reinterpretations of traditional music and development of the bandura as a contemporary concert instrument.