This week on the Radiant Others Klezmer Music Podcast, Dan sits down to speak with Susi Evans & Szilvia Csaranko. Susi and Szilvia are stalwarts of the UK and German klezmer scenes who joined together as a duo in 2019 after meeting earlier at Yiddish Summer Weimar. Their latest release is Fun an Altn Klezmer Heft: Beautiful Music from Old Manuscripts, a 44-track, double album of tunes gleaned from their participation in the Klezmer Institute’s Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript project. We encourage listeners to check out our Klezmer Institute episode for more on the history of that project.
Dan, Susi, and Szilvia talk about how we all got into klezmer and how learning by ear played a central role, especially for Susi and Szilvia, who grew up with classical training. And we talk about what it was like to work with these newly unearthed manuscripts, which meant returning to notated music. Alongside the issues surrounding notation, we talk about the duo’s other projects, including their 2020 release, the Klezmer Playbook. And we cover the challenges and complexities of teaching and communicating klezmer to different audiences.
This episode is the first in an informal series about how different klezmer artists make fresh music from archival sources. Stay tuned for more episodes featuring different archives and different artists!
Music in this episode:
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