Fun An Altn Klezmer Heft: Beautiful Music from Old Manuscripts

Susi Evans is a dynamic clarinettist from Shekoyokh and this is her second duo album with Hungarian-born, German-based accordionist Szilvia Csaranko. Their last was versions of tunes by Ukrainian-born clarinettist Dave Tarras (1895-1989) who became an inspiration in his later years to the nascent American klezmer revival. This double album draws on much older sources discovered relatively recently in the Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv. Around 1,400 tunes were collected on expeditions in Poland and Ukraine between 1912 and 1914, led by ethnographer S Ansky, the author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. Evans and Csaranko have picked 44 of these and arranged them attractively for C clarinet (typical for klezmer) and piano accordion, possibly making them sound something like they did when they were first played.

The opening ‘Freylikhs’ dance tune is in a typical D minor mode called Mogen Ovos, with a sometimes flattened second, which is why it immediately sounds so klezmer-like. Another distinctive and appealing example of the klezmer sound is the ‘Khosidl’, a slow Hassidic dance in Freygish, a major scale with a flattened second. But as klezmer musicians in the region also played non-Jewish music there are mazurkas and polkas that belong to the world of Polish folk.

What we have here are a lot of unknown tunes, collected when the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe were at their height before WWI, and idiomatically played by brilliant musicians who really know their stuff. This is a rare treat, although 44 pieces are a bit much for one sitting.