Jewish Music Week is back this spring with larger daytime venues and new community partners. The popular annual festival, running this year from May 10 to 17, presents free daytime programs, including films, lectures, a panel discussion and concerts, and ticketed evening events, at venues in downtown Toronto and North York.
“We keep outgrowing our daytime venues, so we had to find places that are larger,” said Aliza Spiro, who founded Jewish Music Week (JMW) in 2011.
This year, the festival is presenting several events with some new partners. As well, five of the seven evening events are presented in partnership with synagogues. Zoomer Media, which partnered with JMW this year, will broadcast a live performance.
In partnership with the Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA), Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre, JMW presents Toronto composer and singer Charles Heller performing his song cycle Tramvay Lider (Street Car Songs), a musical setting of Yiddish poems written by the poet Shimen Nepom, who was a College Street streetcar conductor until his death in 1939.
Included in this event, at 10 a.m. on May 11 at First Narayever Congregation, is a slide presentation by the OJA about Jewish sites on College Street.
With the Azrieli Music Project (which has launched a competition for composers of Jewish orchestral music, with two $50,000 prizes), JMW is presenting, at noon on May 11 at Columbus Centre, a panel of Canadian musicians and musicologists discussing Jewish orchestral music, from Mahler and Mendelssohn to the current millennial composers.
In partnership with Zoomer Media, JMW presents Canadian millennial composer and pianist Adam Sherkin, performing classics and his own solo piano music at noon on May 14 at Zoomer Hall. The concert will be broadcast live on the radio station The New Classical 96.3.
“We realize that many people who love music are not mobile, so they can tune in and hear the entire event,” Spiro said.
To complement the exhibit Photos from the Lodz Ghetto, JMW partners with the Art Gallery of Ontario, on May 17 at 2 p.m., to present vocalists from HaKol Ha’lvri performing songs that would have been known and sung by the Jews living in the ghetto.
JMW opens this year with a tribute to the prolific Jewish composer Milton Barnes at 7:30 p.m. on May 10 at the Glenn Gould Studio. The composer’s sons, Daniel and Micah, will share memories of their father at the concert.
The Wonderful World of Moishe Oysher, at 7:30 p.m. on May 12 at the St. Lawrence Centre, features Cantor Simon Spiro performing songs from Oysher’s movies (he starred in a 1937 Yiddish movie called The Cantor’s Son), his concert appearances and his jazzy cantorial albums.
On May 15 and May 16, JMW’s musical Shabbat events will be held at Temple Har Zion, Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue, Beth Tzedec Congregation and Beth Sholom Congregation, where musicians, singers and singalongs will be featured. At Beth Emeth on May 15, Cantor David Edwards leads the service with musicians until Shabbat, when the instruments stop but the singing continues.
“We want to make sure that religious people can enjoy Jewish Music Week,” said Aliza Spiro. “We make it a point not to schedule musical programming on Shabbat.”
And after Shabbat ends, JMW presents a community melaveh malka and Banter with the Cantor at 10:15 p.m. on May 16, at Shaarei Shomayim Congregation. Benjaimin Maissner, Tibor Kovari, Simon Spiro and Aaron Bensoussan, cantors from around the world who are now based in Toronto, will speak about their backgrounds, sing and lead a singalong. People are welcome to send any cantor/Jewish-music questions in advance to [email protected].
lso about visual art. In 2011, when JMW launched its art contest, the festival received four submissions, Aliza Spiro said. This year the contest received some 250 submissions from students in day and public schools, whose assignment was to draw the music of the Jewish holidays. The winning submissions will be exhibited from May 5 to 18 at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre gallery.
A new category, artists of note, was created on the JMW website this year to acknowledge artists not included in the Miles Nadal exhibit. Grade 8 Bialik Hebrew Day School student Robyn Beallor received an award of excellence for her stark grey-and-white drawing of Jews in concentration-camp bunks.
“I was thinking about how music can help people through the worst of times and we always find a way to celebrate the holidays,” Robyn said. “I would like the viewer to notice that this is during the Holocaust where they are celebrating Shabbat with potatoes as candles.”
Other Jewish Music Week highlights:
• Sefarad – three cantors, Ramon Tasat, Natasha Hirschhorn and Tibor Kovari, perform liturgical, Ladino, folk and modern Mizrachi-style songs at 8 p.m. on May 11 at Beth Tikvah Synagogue.
• The Klezmer Conservatory Band plays at 7:30 p.m. on May 13 at Holy Blossom Temple.
• Jazz guitarist Stan Samole, who draws upon modern jazz, swing, folk, pop, reggae and blues, entertains at noon on May 13, in the main floor atrium of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Cantor Tibor Kovari and singer Kati Kovari lead a singalong, with dancing, to celebrate the anniversary of the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel. May 14 at 2 p.m. at the Miles Nadal JCC.
• What’s It All About, The Burt Bacharach and Hal David Songbook, is on at 8 p.m. on May 14 at Hugh’s Room.
• Ruth Lowe’s son, Tom Sandler, gives a presentation about his mother, who wrote the hit song I’ll Never Smile Again for Frank Sinatra, at 10 a.m. on May 15 at the Barbara Frum Library.
• Mahler on the Couch, a movie about the composer, his wife, her lover and Sigmund Freud, will be shown at 10:30 a.m. on May 17 at Hang Loose Media.
• Julius: Yiddish Barbershop Quartet, made up of Josh Dolgin (Socalled), Anthony Russell, Mitch Smolkin and David Wall, performs at 7 p.m. on May 17 at Temple Sinai.
For more information, visit www.jewishmusicweek.com
