100,000 Souls – Hundert Toyznter Gemiter – Solo concert at UPJB – Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique.

Watch this space for more information and booking link.

Polina will also teach a Yiddish song and klezmer workshop in the afternoon. 

This programme explores the beauty within the heart amidst a world of madness, featuring a blend of original and folk songs, including several European premieres. The musical pulse of the title song amplifies existential questions from a century ago. It is a setting of a poem by Leyb Kvitko, a symbolist and member of the USSR Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee: a hundred thousand souls walk the Earth blindly – lost, powerless, faithless. Do we Presn di Lipn (press our lips closed), as expressed in a poem by Avrom-Nochum Stencl, an expressionist and friend of Franz Kafka? Are we Farblondzhet in Vald (lost in the forest), as depicted in one of the folk songs in the programme? Do we embrace the world’s tears like Sankt Besht in Itsik Manger’s ballad? Or do we forget the world and escape into a realm of open eroticism, as in Polina’s song cycle based on the feminist stories of Troim Katz Handler? Musically, the programme has an emotional thread from beginning to end. It is never the same: there is a lot of improvisation and raw spontaneity. Join this odyssey with 100,000 souls and one performer, all in search for the profound truths that music may reveal.

Polina Shepherd was raised in a Cossack / Jewish family in Tatarstan, Russia. Whilst studying in Kazan State Academy in the 1990s, she toured with Russia′s first klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha. By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir and klezmer band leader, composer, touring musician, educator and festival organiser. Moved to the UK in 2003. Her recent work includes touring with Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland (OH, USA) Grammy-winning baroque orchestra and ‘Folk-Cabaret’ The Stranniki with Psoy Korolenko (UK-USA). In cinema, she recorded for The Windermere Children and appears conducting and soloing in TV series The Crown. In theatre, most recently she’s been Music Adviser and recorded for National Theatre co-production of Kin by Amit Lahav; Music Adviser and arranger for a A Secret About Joy, by Sarah Brown in Sibiu, Romania. Polina’s choral work has been published internationally, most recently in Edition Peters Yiddish Choral Series. Music Director of Caravan Orchestra and Choir, an international project for young musicians with classical, jazz and Arab music backgrounds. Travelling the world, she continues to be an international culture makher, connecting communities in the global music village.

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