Red Thread 
“Ingrained with generational storytelling, Red Thread fuses the past into the present with gorgeous harmonies and folk sensibilities. Their music harkens to the importance of ancestry, culture, and traditions still present in our lives.” – Music in
Minnesota.com
Red Thread is a woman-fronted ensemble playing folk music exploring and exploding Yiddish, Balkan, Irish, and Scandinavian vocal traditions. With the tight harmonies of a family band and lush, innovative instrumentation, the ensemble shares traditional and new music with warmth and humor. Frontwoman Sarah Larsson is known as a member of The Nightingale Trio and a co-founder of Klezmer on Ice; The Nightingale Trio performed on the Cedar stage and on “A Prairie Home Companion” and has been called “a revelation” by Minnesota Public Radio’s Steve Staruch. Ensemble members in winter 2026 include Twin Cities luminaries: Kat Parent, Rada Kolarova, Pat O’Keefe (clarinet), Jacqueline Ultan (cello), and Toby Ramaswamy (drums).
Red Thread’s teachers include Ethel Raim (NEA National Heritage Fellow 2018), Michael Alpert (NEA National Heritage Fellow 2015), and musicians working in the lineage of Flory Jagoda (NEA National Heritage Fellow 2002). Red Thread has performed with & opened for: The Klezmatics, Lemon Bucket Orkestra, Maryna Krut, Humbird, Roe Family Singers, and Spencer LaJoye. Red Thread, with Sarah Larsson, was a Cedar Commissions artist in 2024.
https://www.redthreadsings.com/
Polina Shepherd
Russian-born and UK-based Polina Shepherd is a central figure in global innovation of contemporary Yiddish music. Shepherd’s solo performances weave together 19th–20th century folklore with original compositions exploring themes of travel, identity, and cultural fusion, infused with humor, heart, and mesmerizing improvisation.
Born into a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk, Polina was then an active young Jewish leader in Tatarstan during the 1980s and 1990s, as Jews in the Soviet Union began to reconnect with their roots. At just 17, she joined Russia’s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, touring the former Soviet Union while studying her musical heritage. Since moving to the UK in 2003, Polina continues to lead choirs and collaborate with various bands, orchestras, and soloists, performing internationally.
“Shepherd’s performance, like all the best ones we’ve heard this week, was not about kitsch, sentimentality, or nostalgia. This wasn’t singing around the campfire. Delivering the prayer inimitably, with ornamentation reflecting her immersion in the chant of the muezzin as much as in the cantorial tradition, it was about transcendence via art. It was a cry from her own heart, an act of creation, and a transformation of time and space into.” – Forward
