Primo Levi: His life and work celebrated through education and song

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation, the Maltz Museum of Jewish History, the University of Pittsburgh Jewish Studies Program, The Jack Buncher Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University, the JFCS Holocaust Center of Northern California and the UJA JCC Greenwich, is thrilled to bring together renowned artists and scholars for a very special event honoring Primo Levi’s life and work through education and song.Primo Levi scholar Professor Lina Insana will help contextualize the live performance of excerpts from Shema: Primo Levi from Poem to Song, a project that set Levi’s poetry to original music, by vocal artist Shulamit Ottolenghi with musicians and composers Shai Bachar and Frank London.

Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. Levi is considered by many as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

More about this special LIVE musical segment –

Excerpts from SHEMA’: Primo Levi – From Poem to Song.
Featuring:

Shulamit Ottolenghi: artistic initiative and voice

Shai Bachar: piano and composition

Frank London: composition and special live trumpet solo number from NY

Shulamit’s program Shema includes a selection of Levi’s poems, a hidden and powerful gem amongst his much more renowned prose. The poems were set to music especially for Shulamit by NY based composer and trumpeter Frank London (Grammy award for contemporary world music) and Jazz pianist and composer Shai Bachar, who divides his time between NY and Tel Aviv.

The premiere of Shema’ was held in November 2018 at the Flautissimo Festival in Rome.

Since then, the program has been included in the Italian Official Governmental Committee for the Primo Levi Centenary and presented at the MEIS in Ferrara on the occasion of the European Jewish Culture Day in 2019 and presented in Tel Aviv by the Italian Institute of Culture in December 2019.

Levi’s restrained, yet relentless style demands a contemporary sound capable of unfolding the poems’ innate thymus and harmonies, allowing the poetical and musical voices to enhance each other and hopefully help spread Levi’s universal ethical message, now and for generations to come.

For further information and reviews of SHEMA’: https://www.shulamitottolenghi.com/shema

In January, CWB will host three additional Primo Levi programs:

January 4 at 4pm: “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi: Book Talk with Professor Lina Insana

January 6 at 4pm: Teaching Primo Levi in the Classroom- a workshop for educators

January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day: A CWB global TEACH-IN for all educators to bring Primo Levi to their students on this day of remembrance.

Charlette Shulamit Ottolenghi

Charlette Shulamit Ottolenghi is an Italian-Israeli world music singer. Brought up in Milan by an Italian father and an English mother of Polish origin, she emigrated to Israel in 1973.

Shulamit’s music reflects her multifaceted identity, ranging from Jewish Italian Liturgy to songs from the Holocaust and various Italian and Jewish Folk traditions. She always researches , edits and produces all her programs.

In recent years her interest has centered on music dedicated to the Holocaust. Shulamit strongly believes in the capacity of music to reach zones in the human soul, where sometimes words alone may fail and that art may successfully compliment and facilitate the transmission of academic and historic research.

Her CD, “For you the sun will shine – songs of women in the Shoa” was released in 2014 and co -sponsored by the Hadassah Brandeis Institution”. The CD is a rare compilation of songs written by women musicians in the camps, with the contemporary musical arrangements by the composers Frank London (Grammy Award Winner for Contemporary World music) and Shai Bachar.

The original program was described as “ new, different, essential in the field of Holocaust music”.

Her last program Shema’: Primo Levi -from Poem to Song was included in the Italian Governmental Committee for the Primo Levi Centenary.

At home, in Tel aviv, she maintains a lively musical dialogue with her origins and performs with prominent musicians in Italy and abroad.

Shulamit has been repeatedly invited to perform by both private and public institutions, ranging from the Israeli Embassy to the Vatican and most Italian and Israeli Municipalities, to Museums, Universities and Festivals both in Israel and abroad.

Building upon her classical training, Shulamit has expanded her repertoire to include musical encounters with world, folk and electronic music. She is specially interested in rare Jewish repertoires and always in search of a dialogue between different musical languages.

For more information about Shulamit and her work: https://www.shulamitottolenghi.com/
​

Shai Bachar

Shai Bachar is a classically trained pianist and composer. Born in Jerusalem’s cultural melting pot, his sound is informed by his immersion in jazz, middle-eastern and electronic music, and is distinguished by his bold and arresting synthesis of these musical traditions.

Bachar has collaborated with virtuoso musicians from around the globe: from the spiritual and traditional Sufi music of Ömar Faruk Tekbilek (Turkey), to the groundbreaking music of Meira Asher (Holland / Israel), Bassist Avishai Cohen (Israel) and released two albums under the Tzadik record label, with Jewish avant-garde artists such as Greg Wall (New York City) Grammy award winner Frank London, founder of the Klezmatics (New York City). His singular talent has garnered the attention of global corporations seeking to expand their reach across cultures.

Frank London

Trumpeter/composer Frank London is a member of the Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, has performed with John Zorn, LL Cool J, Mel Torme, Lester Bowies Brass Fantasy, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, Maurice El Medioni and Gal Costa, and is featured on over 100 cds. His own recordings include Invocations (cantorial music); Frank Londons Klezmer Brass Allstars Di Shikere Kapelye and Brotherhood Of Brass; Nigunim and The Zmiros Project (Jewish mystical songs, with Klezmatics vocalist Lorin Sklamberg); The Debt (film and theater music); The Shekhina Big Band; the soundtrack to The Shvitz; the soundtrack to Perl Gluck’s The Divahn and four releases with the Hasidic New Wave.

His projects include the folk-opera A Night In The Old Marketplace (based on Y.L. Peretz’s Bay nakht oyfn altn mark), Davenen for Pilobolus and the Klezmatics, Great Small Works’ The Memoirs Of Gluckel Of Hameln and Min Tanaka’s Romance. He composed music for John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet and Men With Guns, Yvonne Rainer’s Murder And Murder, the Czech-American Marionette Theaters Golem and Tamar Rogoff’s Ivye Project.

He was music director for David Byrne and Robert Wilsons The Knee Plays, collaborated with Palestinian violinist Simon Shaheen, taught Jewish music in Canada, Crimea and the Catskills, and produced CD’s for Gypsy Ledgend Esma Redzepova, and Algerian Pianist Maurice el Medioni.

He has been featured on HBOs Sex And The City, at the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, and was a co-founder of Les Miserables Brass Band and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

Professor Lina Insana

Lina Insana is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh [faculty profile]. A native Pittsburgher, she earned her BA and MA from Pitt and holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary Italian cultural production. Most of her work on Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is concerned with textual mediation, translation, and adaptation and their relationship to testimony and memory. Newer research, instead, seeks to interrogate formations of transnational and regional identity at the margins of conventionally-accepted definitions of Italianness.

Her first book, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (U of Toronto Press, 2009) examines Primo Levi’s testimonial work through the lens of translation, broadly understood as a mediating and interpretive mode that creates spaces of testimonial agency for the survivor-author. This work was recognized both by the MLA (Scaglione Italian Manuscript Prize, 2007) and the American Association of Italian Studies (20th c. Prize, 2009). She is currently completing a book entitled “Charting the Island: Sicilian Position and Belonging from Unification to the European Union,” which is a geocritical cultural history of Sicilian belonging under the modern Italian State (1861-present).

She is also engaged in a third book-length project that explores expressions of italianità in North American Italian “colonies” between the first and second World Wars through institutions and cultural icons that helped immigrant communities to negotiate complex and often competing civic identities.

Prof. Insana has served two terms (2013-2019) as Chair of the Department of French & Italian and has been Director of Graduate Studies in Italian since 2010. From 2016-2018 she was Chair of Pitt’s Humanities Council. Since 2012 she has been the lead organizer of Pittsburgh’s Italian Film Festival USA, a curated festival of contemporary Italian Cinema that takes place every spring on Pitt’s campus.