‘Lib’Ele Duo’ Present: The Yiddish-French Connection

Presented in Yiddish, French, and English.

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French singers Eléonore Biezunski and Eléonore Weill team up as the ‘Lib’Ele Duo’ (The Dragonflies) to present this rare concert blending French and Yiddish music with special musical guest Pete Rushefsky. Featuring Yiddish songs by French songwriter Jacques Grober, and translations of French songs into Yiddish, this concert also includes traditional Yiddish songs from various folklore collections and rare klezmer melodies from Romania, Ukraine, and beyond. As a special treat, the Duo will perform excerpts from their new theatrical adaptation of Aaron Zeitlin’s mystical and image-rich poem, the Esoterishe Poem (1932), with director and puppeteer Jon Levin.

About the Performers

Eléonore Biezunski (violin, vocals) is a Yiddish singer and classically trained klezmer violinist who grew up in a Yiddish speaking family in France. She has performed in Europe and the United States with her bands, including the Klezmographers with Pete Rushefsky in New York and Shpilkes in Paris, which recently released its first album Zol zayn. She has also worked as a musician on several theater productions. Part of her repertoire consists of Yiddish songs and klezmer music from various folklore collections, including the Ruth Rubin archives held at YIVO. She was trained in klezmer violin by Alicia Svigals, Cookie Seigelstein, Steven Greenman, Michael Alpert, and Bob Cohen, and received vocal training from Haim Isaacs and Shura Lipovsky in France and with Lorin Sklamberg, Ethel Raim in New York, and Josh Waletzky in Weimar and learned throughout the klezmer world with musicians such as Zev Feldman, Alan Bern, Patrick Farrell, Frank London, David Krakauer, Michael Winograd and Merlin Shepherd. She has also performed with Trio Figelin (with Deborah Strauss), Jake Schulman-Ment and Lisa Gutkin.

Ms. Biezunski additionally serves as Assistant Director of the European Institute for Jewish Music in Paris, where she is a PhD candidate at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), researching new Yiddish music. She is currently a YIVO fellow (Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship). eleonorebiezunski.wix.com/yiddish-music

Eléonore Weill (wooden flutes, vocals) was raised in a musical family in southern France and spent her youth playing both classical and traditional music (mostly Occitane, Romanian and Jewish) on wooden flutes, hurdy gurdy, and accordion at carnivals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, communions, and dances. She then went on to complete a master's degree in Ethnomusicology from Sorbonne University in Paris and Columbia University on klezmer music, and spent a year living and studying folk music in Romania. She is the recipient of a NYSCA grant to study traditional Yiddish singing with Ethel Raim, and has participated in numerous klezmer festivals in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. She has enjoyed a versatile career performing early, classical and contemporary music, klezmer and Yiddish song, Romanian folk music, Occitan folk music, and various other styles on wooden flutes, piano, and vocals throughout Europe and the New York metro area with the C.M.B.V. (Baroque Music Center of Versailles), Orchestre National de Toulouse, Les Saqueboutiers, Ensemble Oneiroi, Miquéu Montanaro, Jenny Romaine and Great Small Works, Joey Weisenberg, Shpilkes, Jake Shulman-Ment, Les Eclats and many others. After years of travel and study, Eléonore now resides in Brooklyn, NY where she performs and teaches music. eleonoreweill.tumblr.com

Jon Levin (Director) is an international director and performer and Co-Artistic Director of Sinking Ship Productions. Most recently he co-created and directed Powerhouse at the New Ohio Theatre (NYTimes Critics Pick). In addition to his work with Sinking Ship, he is also a founding member of The Krumple Theatre company, an international mask theater troupe which will make their American premiere with Go to Sleep, Goddamnit! in April 2015 as part of the Tank's curated Flint & Tinder season. He has performed internationally with Wakka Wakka, Le Mot Juste, The Krumple and in NYC for Banksy’s Better Out than In. Jon is a graduate of L'école Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and holds a BA from Oberlin College in theater and neuroscience.

Pete Rushefsky is a leading revivalist of the tsimbl (cimbalom), the traditional hammered dulcimer of klezmer music. As a composer, he has worked to promote a performance system for contemporary klezmer known as Concert Form Klezmer that draws inspiration from Eastern classical musics and Jewish mysticism. Rushefsky is currently touring with violinist Itzhak Perlman in a program/recording titled "Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul," featuring the leading cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, as well as klezmer revival legends Hankus Netsky and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. He has performed at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Library of Congress and Boston’s Symphony Hall, as well as a number of other leading international venues, and curated and performed at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Yiddish performing arts program. Rushefsky has been featured on PBS’s Great Performances, National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion, All Things Considered and American Routes, as well as Radio One France. He regularly concertizes and records with many of the leading contemporary performers of Yiddish music, including clarinetist Joel Rubin, violinists Steven Greenman, Lisa Gutkin, Jake Shulman-Ment and Alicia Svigals, flutist Adrianne Greenbaum and vocalists Michael Alpert, Ethel Raim and Rebecca Kaplan. By day, Rushefsky serves as Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York City, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving and nurturing the performing arts traditions of the city’s immigrant communities. A popular instructor at Yiddish folk arts camps internationally, Rushefsky authored a pioneering instructional book on adapting the American 5-string banjo for klezmer, and an upcoming book on klezmer performance for hammered dulcimer. He is a well-known lecturer on klezmer and other traditional musics with a number of published articles to his credit.