Guy Mendilow Ensemble to Perform February 7, 2019

  • Guy Mendilow Ensemble

On February 7, 2019, at 8:00 pm at UConn's von der Mehden Recital Hall, the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, in partnership with the UConn Department of Music, brings the Guy Mendilow Ensemble to Storrs to perform The Forgotten Kingdom. As part of the Center's Scholarship and the Arts initiative, this performance is made free and open to the public!  

Please pre-register to attend!

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at pamela.weathers@uconn.edu or 860-486-2271.

About the Guy Mendilow Ensemble

 

The Guy Mendilow Ensemble is an award-winning quintet with a cast of world-class players who mesmerize audiences with their skill in playing a wide variety of instruments.  The Guy Mendilow Ensemble draws on traditional tunes, techniques, and tales but in elegant arrangements and with radical reframing. The emotionality of Western classical music is intensified by the bittersweet rawness of Tango, gorgeous vocal harmonies and the rhythmic fire of classical Arabic percussion. GME’s storytelling is inspired by the dreamlike qualities of Pablo Neruda and Michael Ondaatje, and by Dan Carlin’s vivid restoration of faded historical memory.

GME is honoured to be the recipient of multiple funding awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts and Western Arts Alliance on the basis of its artistry, cultural preservation and the strengthening of communities through the arts.

About the Show

 

Folding radio drama-style stories into a top-flight world music concert, The Forgotten Kingdom conjures women’s voices lost to war and upheaval. Audiences traverse picturesque Mediterranean port towns and faded memories of Ottoman villages, from Salónica to Sarajevo, guided by an "international tour-de-force" (Bethlehem Morning Call) whose world-class musicianship and cinematic storytelling restores living colour to tales of ordinary people living through extraordinary change.

Weaving together late 19th/early 20th-century women’s songs from Sephardic enclaves of the former Ottoman Empire, the show evokes a panorama of the unraveling of an older Mediterranean world —not as we see it today with the benefit of textbook hindsight, but as ordinary people lived it, unaware of how the dots would connect. With song lyrics in Ladino, an endangered blend of archaic Spanish with Turkish and Greek, together with English narration, with heart and humour, the show renders scenes of daily life from WWI and the Ottoman Empire’s collapse to the glimmers of democratic hopes crushed by fascist regimes that cloaked entire communities in a ‘shroud of oblivion.’

What People Are Saying

 

...music of hope and affirmation, sophisticated in its delivery but easily accessible to listeners anywhere” — Chicago Tribune

culturally significant” — Bruce Halliday, Port Theatre, Nanaimo, BC, Canada

“I dare any audience to NOT be swept away by this show”— Natalie Neuert, UVM Lane Series, Burlington, VT