Publication date/erscheint: 11 November, 1999
Oytsres - Treasures
Klezmer Music from 1908 to 1996
Oytsres, the seventh production in the Jewish Music Series edited by Rita Ottens und Joel Rubin, contains many of the musical personalities described in their book Klezmer Music (Barenreiter/dtv), the colorful social history of Yiddish wedding and celebratory music spanning centuries and continents.
Among these are the Ukrainian-Jewish violinist M.I. Rabinovitsh, likely the last representative of the lyrical and ornate violin tradition of Jewish Eastern Europe, as well as Naftule Brandwein, Shloimke Beckerman, Dave Tarras and the 87 year-old Max Epstein, the four great American-Jewish clarinetists of the immigrant era in New York. The influence of klezmer music on the Yiddish theater can be heard in Solomon Fayntukh's symphonic arrangements of traditional klezmer tunes, recorded 1939 in Kharkov in the USSR, and in the melodies of the beloved Yiddish theater composer Alex Olshanetsky in New York. That the klezmer tradition has organically continued on within both the religious and secular worlds is shown by such varied performances as a field recording of the orthodox clarinetist Avrom Segal from Israel and the ensemble of the concert clarinetist Joel Rubin from Los Angeles, who is considered by both the oldest generation of Eastern European-influenced American klezmorim and the Hasidic musicians of Israel to be the most important interpreter of the klezmer art today.
These rare, mostly historical recordings are all issued on CD for the first
time and stem from the National Sound Archives (Jerusalem), the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research (New York) and Gratz College (Pennsylvania),
as well as from the archive of DeutschlandRadio and private European
collections.