78TH SEASON OF

CONCERTS

national gallery of art | december 1, 2019
2 3

PROGRAM

Alicia Svigals, klezmer fiddle and voice 

Uli Geissendoerfer, piano 

With special guest William Schimmel, accordion

Beregovski Suite: Reimagining a Long-Lost Klezmer Archive

December 1, 2019 | 3:30 p.m.

West Building, West Garden Court

The program will be announced from the stage.

Alicia Svigals, Uli Geissendoerfer, and William Schimmel, photo by Kyle Ober
4 5

THE MUSICIANS

Alicia Svigals

Violinist, vocalist, and composer Alicia Svigals is the world’s leading klezmer violinist 

and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, which she codirected for seventeen 

years. She has composed music for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwright Tony Kushner, documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand, and singer/songwriters 

Debbie Friedman and Diane Birch, with whom she has also collaborated, as well as with 

the late poet Allen Ginsburg, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Gary Lucas, 

and Najma Akhtar. Svigals has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, MTV, 

Good Morning America, PBS’s Great Performances, and the soundtrack for the L-Word. 

Her klezmer roots band, Alicia Svigals’ Klezmer Fiddle Express, plays at festivals 

around the United States and the world.

Svigals was awarded the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s annual New Jewish Music 

Network Music Commission for her original live score to the 1918 film The Yellow 

Ticket, which she is currently touring. She has been a fellow at LABA: A Laboratory for 

New Jewish Culture, located at the 14th Street Y in New York. Every year LABA invites 

a group of artists to consider ancient texts and create works that push the boundaries 

of what Jewish art can be. While at LABA, Svigals composed a song cycle based on 

Yiddish poetry. She is currently touring her newest project, which features a music 

score she wrote with Donald Sosin — a legendary silent film music pianist — to the 1923 

silent film, the Ancient Law.

Uli Geissendoerfer 

Jazz pianist, composer, and scholar Uli Geissendoerfer has worked with Grammy-nominee 

William Cepeda, Groove Collective, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Leslie Uggams, Tito Puente, 

Cirque du Soleil, and David Cassidy. His current projects include “Colors” a World Jazz 

Quintet; Bangalore Breakdown, and an Indian world jazz project featuring multi-wind 

player Premik Russell Tubbs. In 2009, Geissendoerfer moved to Las Vegas where he 

was the conductor, pianist, and bandleader for the Cirque du Soleil’s Viva Elvis show. 

He resurrected the Latin Jazz Ensemble at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which 

has since won DownBeat awards in 2013, 2014, and 2015. He has also initiated a lecture 

series at the university and serves as curator for the Steinway Concert Series. He 

founded the Jazz Club at the Dispensary Lounge.

William Schimmel 

William Schimmel earned his doctor of music degree from the Juilliard School. A composer, author, lecturer, philosopher, and virtuoso accordionist, he performs in a wide 

variety of styles and has appeared with major symphony orchestras. He has recorded 

with such noted performers as Sting and Tom Waits, the latter of whom said, “Schimmel 

doesn’t play the accordion — he is an accordion.” An authority on Kurt Weill, Schimmel 

has recorded all of Weill’s music with accordion. He is a prolific composer for both the 

concert stage and Broadway and founded the renowned Tango Project. In 1992, he was 

named “Best Accordionist” by Keyboard Magazine and was also recognized as the person 

who has done the most to elevate the instrument’s image. 
6 7

PROGRAM

Beregovski Suite: Reimagining a Long-Lost Klezmer Archive

Twenty years ago, violinist Alicia Svigals released her groundbreaking album Fidl, the 

first contemporary recording of the deep and ecstatic klezmer fiddle music that had 

been beloved across Jewish Eastern Europe for hundreds of years. In 2018, she followed 

up this recording with Beregovski Suite, a project with Grammy-nominated jazz pianist 

Uli Geissendoerfer. Together the musicians bring to life long-lost melodies from the 

early twentieth-century fieldwork of Moshe Beregovski (1892 – 1961) and reimagine 

them for the twenty-first century.

In the 1930s, Moshe Beregovski, a Jewish scholar from Ukraine, set out with eerie 

prescience to collect and preserve the deep and rich Jewish musical tradition around 

him. On what turned out to be the eve of the destruction of European Jewry, Beregovski 

organized expeditions to Ukrainian shtetlach (small Jewish towns) and sought out the 

eldest singers and instrumentalists, asking them to pour their collective folk knowledge 

into his recording horn. In this way, he managed to save thousands of beautiful Jewish 

folk songs, klezmer dance tunes, and religious melodies on wax cylinders, the medium 

of the day. A few years afterward, the culture he had documented was destroyed in the 

Holocaust, and Beregovski himself was arrested and sent to the Gulag. He never saw 

his work published in his lifetime, and for decades it was thought that those precious 

and important recordings were forever lost. But in the 1980s, ethnomusicologist Mark 

Slobin published Beregovski’s transcriptions of his collection, and in the 1990s, with 

the opening up of the Soviet Union, the cylinders were unearthed in a dusty archive 

in Kiev. Now those long-lost melodies and voices are beginning to speak to us again.

Program notes by Alicia Svigals

6

Upcoming Events of the SeventyEighth Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Capitol Hill Chorale

Frederick Binkholder, Artistic Director

Caroling in the Rotunda

December 7, 1:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m.

West Building Rotunda

JACK Quartet

Modern Medieval

Music by Thomas Morley, Solage, 

Rodericus, Chaya Czernowin, Marcos 

Balter, and John Zorn.

December 8, 3:30 p.m.

Xaverian High School Choir

Joseph Loposky, Director

Caroling in the Rotunda

December 14, 1:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m.

West Building Rotunda

Calmus Vocal Ensemble

Carols from around the World 

December 15, 3:30 p.m.

East of the River

Solstice: Darkness Is Your Candle

Music of the Mediterranean, Balkans, 

Armenia, and the Middle East. 

December 21, 3:30 p.m.

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

and all of its programs is free of charge, 

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording 

equipment during the performance 

is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic 

devices are turned off.

—

Concerts are made possible in part 

through the generosity of donors to the 

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition 

of their support. Please contact the 

development office at (202) 842-6450 or 

circle@nga.gov for more information.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2019 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

cover Mildred E. Bent, Design from Gray, 

Maine 1800 (no. 1): From Proposed 

Portfolio “Maine Wall Stencils,” 1935/1942, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Index of American Design, 1943.8.18116
NGA.GOV/MUSIC