Toronto Summer Music’s presentation in the Isabel Bader Theatre on Monday evening featured the Payadora Tango Ensemble and dance company PointeTango. It was very much a two part show. The first half featured typical Payadora fare; some original compositions, some arrangements of standards, all in a tango style. And all, of course, performed with the excellence we have come to expect from this group. The twist here was that many of the numbers were accompanied by dance by Erin Scott- Kafadar and Alexander Richardson of PointeTango.
Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango is a CD of songs based on the recollections of Holocaust survivors. Some of the songs deal with events during the Holocaust and others with the trauma of survivors. There are two main sources for the lyrics. One is the Baycrest Holocaust Surviviors Poetry Project facilitated by Dr. Paula David. The poems produced during that process were published in 1995 and adapted for this project. Other songs are based on the writings of Holocaust survivor Molly Applebaum who escaped by being buried under a barn in a small wooden box. The English texts have been adapted for this project by Dan Rosenberg and translated into Yiddish, others were originally written in Polish and remain in that tongue.
operaramblings 