Alan Bern and Mark Kovnatskiy. Di Elegye fin Fastrigosen. TesFest festival, Bucharest, May 25.2023

Dear friends!
Many of you have been asking if our duet "Di Yidishe Neshome" will be recorded with my dearest friend, colleague and mentor Dr. Alan Bern as part of the International Yiddish theater festival TesFest on May 25.
Well, I'm happy to announce that the concert has been recorded and I recently received the video of it (I take this opportunity to thank Oana Monica Nae so much for this recording).
For a number of reasons, I will not post the entire concert, I will limit myself to only a few of its fragments.
I'll start with a fragment of the concert, which is very important for me personally. Many people know me precisely as an instrumentalist, as a klezmer violinist. But in this video, I only play very little, and only at the very end, and most of the time I sing. The song I sang is part of the opera "Di Megile fin Vaymar", with lyrics by Itzik Manger and music by Alan Bern. which premiered at the Yiddish Summer Weimar in 2019. The song is called "Di Elegye fin Fastrigose". In this song, the young tailor Fastrigose, rejected by Queen Esther, who became the wife of King Ahasuerus, turns to Esther, asking her why she left him, agreeing to be the royal wife, instead of fleeing with Fastrigose to Vienna and starting a family with him there.
During the premiere in 2019, the role of Fastrigose was played by a wonderful singer from Chisinau, Moldova, Efim Cherny. Even then I really liked the song, and when, when choosing the repertoire for our concert in Bucharest, Alan offered to perform it as an instrumental piece, I immediately asked permission to let me sing it, which Alan willingly gave me. It is not for me to judge the result, I will leave that to you, dear friends.
So, the elegy of Fastrigose. Enjoy!

[@massoud999]

Shkoyach - יישר כוחך 🖖