Jewish music

Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk

Zmień język:

polski

Fot. M. Starowieyska

A singer, accordion player and researcher of Eastern European musical folklore. Olga is educated in classical music and graduated with master’s degree in Anthropology of Culture (Warsaw University).

Born in Warsaw, she divides her time between home town and Jerusalem, where she has been living at the moment. She initiates Polish-Israeli music projects and collaborates with the organizations promoting Jewish culture in those two countries.

Since the very beginning of her creative work, she has been focusing on Jewish music of Ashkenazi roots, especially from borderlands of Poland (Galitzia, Polesye). She has studied Chassidic music, folk Yiddish songs, multilingual Jewish songs, participated in a two-year seminar for Yiddish songs in the Yiddish Theatre in Warsaw and is studying Yiddish in Yung Yidish center in Tel Aviv. Olga has been also studying traditional singing techniques of Slavic music (like Ukrainian “white voice").

In 2013 with the group of musicans she initiated the project "Jewish Polesye" which lately resulted in her debut album. Olga was inspired by eclectic set of music material from the repertoire of 1930's era Jewish folk singer, Mariam Nirenberg. Nirenberg comes from Polesye, which used to be a borderland of cultures and languages, one of the most wild regions in Europe. The project evokes the lost world of multicultural Polesye, where Yiddish interwind with Ukrainian and Polish. It's premiere took place at prestigious Lincoln Center in New York. It was sucessfully presented at various festivals of Jewish music all around the world (USA, Canada, Israel), including Poland.

The next step of the artist was turning to the urban music. "Li-La-Lo" is the name of the second album by Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk and at the same time a musical cabaret, set up in Tel Aviv in 1944 by a pianist and composer, Moshe Wileński, and a poet Natan Alterman, who emigrated to Palestine from Warsaw. Li-La-Lo based its' work on the pre-war Warsaw cabarets and achieved a great success. Olga with the accompanying musicians reached for tango and other songs, which were popular hits in Warsaw and Jerusalem in the 40s.

The latest project initiated by Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk is "Yiddish Tango". In 2015 the artist invited leading musicians of tango in Poland - Tango Attack to create the new arrangements of the pre-war tangos based on tradition, but in more modern formula. The singer is fascinated by the phenomenon of Warsaw of the 30's, which was the European capital of tango. The vast majority of tango pieces was composed by Polish Jews and it's uniqueness came from combination of Slavic and Jewish elements mixed with Argentinian musical influences. Tango hits were composed in Polish and Yiddish as well.

"Yiddish Tango" was widely presented - from prestigious venues in Israel to Poland. Olga sometimes invites Polish and foreign guests - a legendary singer Sława Przybylska, a famous singer from Israel, Alexander Fisz, and a leading musician of the new Jewish scene in Israel - clarinet player, Ittai Binnun. The album was released in the autumn of 2017.