The Musica non grata series presents a concert of Yiddish tango and popular songs of pre-war Warsaw performed by one of the world's best singers of this genre, Olga Mieleszczuk, and the group Tango Attack.

The Polish-Israeli singer Olga Mieleszczuk is one of the world's best interpreters of Yiddish tango, which originated in Poland in the 1920s as a synthesis of Argentine tango and Jewish folk music called klezmer. Yiddish tango found its home primarily in Warsaw, and the tragic fate of Polish Jews during World War II is deeply encoded in it. In her programmes, featuring a repertoire ranging from the 1920s to the 1940s, she has ingeniously combined dance and contemplative music, interconnecting them in an absorbing manner with the stories of the greatest “Old World” Yiddish tango stars. New arrangements organically fuse modern, contemporary sound with the singular esprit of pre-war tango, which deviated from the original Argentinean form, embracing a softer, more lyrical sound influenced by klezmer. The programme of the concert, held within the Musica non grata project, includes songs in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew, popular melodies, as well as forgotten tunes, into which Olga Mielescszuk breathes new life.

Tango Attack | Grzegorz Bożewicz, bandoneon and accordion | Piotr Malicki, acoustic and electric guitar | Hadrian Filip Tabęcki, piano and music arrangements

The project Tango from Varshe is part of a miniseries consisting of two concerts in cooperation with the Polish Institute in Prague and thematically relates to the life of the Jewish community in Warsaw in the first half of the 20th century. The second concert is the Czech premiere of Symphony No. 21 "Kaddish" by Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg at the National Theatre on 23 April 2022.

More about Tango from Varshe Event www