DANIEL HOFFMAN
klezmer fiddle music
A new project drawing from over twenty five years experience playing, recording, teaching and loving klezmer fiddle music from Eastern Europe.
A Violin Without a Case encapsulates the threadbare and itinerant world that Jewish and Roma musicians lived in in pre-war Eastern Europe. Somehow, from this difficult world, this gorgeous music emerged.
Violinist Daniel Hoffman performs rediscovered music from this vast repertoire of hauntingly beautiful and virtuosic instrumental music, much of it now unknown in Israel.
The repertoire includes zhoks, terkishes, bulgars, freilechs, kolomeikes, and the highest artistic expression of Eastern European Jewish music, the doina. Related to the Turkish taxim, a doina is a free-flowing expressive melodic exploration, both inward-looking and technically challenging.
Having mastered most of the Romanian-style doinas recorded in Europe and America before 1925, Daniel set out to compose new Jewish music, combining the nineteenth-century forms with his own inventive, soulful, irreverent sensibility.
A VIOLIN WITHOUT A CASE
The violin, or fiddle, was the central voice and heart of Eastern European Jewish folk music for centuries. But when Jewish soldiers came home from forced service in the Tsar’s army, the violin’s voice got lost among army-issued brass, wind and percussion instruments. Also known as klezmer, it is often confused with, but different from chassidic music. The klezmer style experienced a worldwide revival in the late 70's and the uniquely vibrant Yiddish fiddle style made a comeback soon after.
For more information and bookings, please contact Daniel by email
or by telephone: +972 (0)54 691 9039
