Norfolk Chamber Consort performance to include Shostakovich’s From Jewish Folk Poetry

by | Mar 17, 2017 | What’s Happening

Monday, April 17, 7:30 pm
ODU’s Chandler Recital Hall

The Norfolk Chamber Consort concludes its 48th season with “Two Rivals.” Dedicated to the two most illustrious names to have emerged out of Soviet Russia — Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich — this program juxtaposes their instrumental and vocal chamber works created during the 1940s and the early 1950s, some of the most dramatic periods in Soviet history.

The concert begins with the Sonata for Flute and Piano in D Major, Op. 94, by Prokofiev. The first half will conclude with Concertino for Two Pianos in A Minor, Op. 94, by Shostakovich.

The second half will open with Oksana Lutsyshyn’s rendition of Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Major, Op. 135 by Prokofiev.

The program will conclude with Shostakovich’s From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79. Created in 1948 as a protest against an anti-Semitic wave that was gathering momentum during the final years of Stalin’s reign, the work consists of 11 settings of Yiddish folk poems in Russian translations. Remarkably, the texts also work in translations back into the original Yiddish, despite the composer’s unfamiliarity with the language. The work was premiered in Yiddish in 1984 during the first London Jewish Music Festival, and separate movements have since been performed and recorded in this setting. The Norfolk Chamber  Consort will present the entire cycle in Yiddish for the first time in the United States. Soprano Bridgid Eversole of Norfolk State University, mezzo soprano Stephanie Marx and tenor Brian Nedvin–an ODU professor who along with Andrey Kasparov helped realize the current setting of the original Yiddish texts to Shostakovich’s music — will be joined by Kasparov on piano.

Tickets are $25 or $10 for students. Available at the door. Call 757-852-9072 or go to ncconsort.org.

A free reception after the concert will be provided bt The Green Onion, a Ghent restaurant.