Ensemble WAKS „SOFIAS REISEN“
- World Music
The Soviet-Jewish ethnomusicologist Sofia Magid (1892-1954) knew that she had very little time left to save the disappearing Yiddish musical culture from oblivion. Equipped with phonographs and the wax cylinders that go with them, she set out on her adventurous journeys and archived the voices of Yiddish singers.
Sofia's fascinating personality inspired the WAKS ensemble. The songs she collected in the shtetls of Ukraine, which were marked by civil war, pogroms and hunger, are full of intensity and have a depressing topicality. WAKS has reconstructed four of these journeys using wax cylinders that can be precisely assigned to their time and topography and has retraced them musically. WAKS's own compositions, modern song arrangements, original phonograph recordings in harmony with the voice of the current singer and recitations from Sofia's fictional diary are woven into an exciting and multi-layered concert program. Multimedia elements such as video projections or recorded sounds complement the project with a sensual and dramatic effect and bring the voices from a bygone world to the stage.
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