Klezmerizing

Staff Writer

Published: November 12, 2004 (Issue # 1020)

FOR SPT / For The St. Petersburg Times Korolenko hopes to break down barriers with his musical blend.

Familiar Soviet songs are likely to sound as they have never sounded before at a concert promoted by the Jewish Community Center this week.

Translated into Yiddish and supplied with Klezmer arrangements by the Moscow-based cult singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko and his All Stars Klezmer Band, the songs will reveal what was hidden behind the Soviet culture's official facade.

Called "Un vu iz der onheyb fun Foterland," the Yiddish for "S Chego Nachinayetsya Rodina," or "What Does the Motherland Start With," after the popular Soviet song, the set features famous songs from the repertoires of such singers as Mark Bernes and Lyudmila Zykina.

"There are love songs, war songs and children's songs; it's a selection that represents different strata of the Soviet song from the 1930s to the 1970s," said Korolenko, speaking by telephone from his home in Moscow this week.

According to Korolenko, the idea came about when Timur Fischel, a singer and collector of Jewish songs from Tallinn, Estonia, brought to his attention Yiddish translations of some of the classic Soviet songs that Sovietish Heimland, the Soviet Union's sole Yiddish magazine published in 1980.

"I found the idea very fruitful for several reasons," said Korolenko.

"If there is a translation into Yiddish, then it could be translated into Klezmer, musically, as well."

"Klezmer music lies in the deep subconsious and sometimes even on the surface of the musical idiom of many composers, even those not of Jewish origin, such as Isaac Dunayevsky, the Porkrass Brothers or Yan Frenkel, just because it had a profound influence on them.

"It also goes without saying that many of the composers were from mestechki [Jewish settlements] from the second generation of settlers.

"Such musical treatment makes it possible to bring this deeper layer of such well-known musical culture to the surface."

Korolenko first performed the set in a few Moscow clubs with Moscow's Klezmasters, including at a Rosh Hashanah party, in 2003. Klezmasters' leader, violinst Mark Kovnatsky, who now lives in Hamburg, will perform in the concert.

However, the rest of the band will be different, featuring Gennady Fomin and Yury Khainson, both of the Kharkov Klezmer Band, on clarinet and accordion respectively, Moscow double bass player Alexei Rozov and St. Petersburg's own Yevgeny Khazdan on piano and Alexei Patrakov on drums.

"We carefully avoid overplaying this Klezmer idiom, so there won't be any postmodernist games," said Korolenko.

"We'll be keeping the balance - it should be a delicate dialogue of totally different musical idioms."

Korolenko said he also performed some of the material solo when on tour in the U.S. last year.

"The response is very positive because people accept it for different reasons," he added. "For some it's another occurence of Soviet nostalgia, with an exotic language, for some Klezmer is important at least as part of the Eastern European ethnic wave, for some it's important for reviving Yiddish both as a language and culture."

"Some could like Jewish songs, but live abroad and not know the Russian language and Soviet songs, so he or she gets a dozen wonderful melodies, tuneful songs as a gift that they haven't ever heard - and suddenly they get them in Yiddish, in their native language."

"For some it's just the opposite. Yiddish is a foreign language for them, it sounds like German, and, for instance, war songs acquire quite a specific, paradoxial resonance.

"There's a lot of different facets there, and for different audiences different facets will be relevant. We want all these audiences to meet each other and feel unity above the language, age, taste, ideological and cultural barriers that exist in our life. At certain times music helps to get rid of them."

For some, however, some of the Soviet songs that Korolenko performs could evoke bad memories of life under communist rule, but he claims there has been no ironic reaction from any slice of his audience.

"I did it for about a year in a draft version, and there was no ironic reaction at all; otherwise, I would drop it," said Korolenko.

"I found that people of very different tastes treat it seriously and with soft humor, which is also necessary."

"I tested this program on very different audiences including the U.S., Germany and all kinds of places in Moscow. I even saw weeping war veterans in St. Petersburg, at the Jewish charity center Khesed."

Psoy Korolenko and All Stars Klezmer Band perform "Un vu iz der onheyb fun Foterland" at the House of the Actor, 86 Nevsky Prospekt, M.: Ploshchad Vosstaniya/Mayakovskaya, at 6:30 p.m. on Monday. www.psoy.ru