Yiddish Song Workshop with Anthony Russell

Venue: Ensemble Room – Room 110A – Evelyn and Mo Ostin Music Center at UCLA campus

Twelve years after making his professional operatic debut in the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Appomattox with the San Francisco Opera Company, Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is now a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in Yiddish song. Join him for this free workshop.

Anthony’s work in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish musical forms led to a musical exploration of his own roots through the research, arrangement and performance of a hundred years of African American roots music, resulting in the album Convergence (2018), a collaboration with klezmer consort Veretski Pass exploring the sounds of one hundred years of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music.

In 2017, Anthony teamed up with accordionist and pianist Dmitri Gaskin to win the Concorso Internacional de Canciones en Idish (Der Idisher Idol) in Mexico City, eventually forming a duo, Tsvey Brider (“Two Brothers”), for the composition and performance of new songs in the Yiddish language. Over the past two years, Tsvey Brider has been featured in Berlin’s Radical Jewish Culture Festival, toured Poland and performed for culture and music festivals all over the United States.

Anthony’s work in Jewish music has brought him to stages in Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, New York, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow, Symphony Space in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, as well as Limmud Fests across the United States and Europe.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music with additional generous support from the David Vickter Foundation.