The Yellow Ticket with Alicia Svigals May 21, 2012

Alicia Svigals premieres an original score to the silent Pola Negri film The Yellow Ticket. Svigals is the world's leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has played with and composed for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, the late poet Allen Ginsburg, and many others. The score, commissioned by the Washington Jewish Music Festival, will also feature piano accompaniment by Marilyn Lerner.

The Yellow Ticket (1918) is the first film to explore Jewish discrimination in Imperial Russia. Lea hides her Jewish heritage to study medicine in St. Petersburg. Coerced into prostitution to pay the rent, Lea is saved by a beloved professor with a secret of his own. Starring Pola Negri, Hollywood’s first European silent film star and originator of the cinematic femme fatale.

“[Alicia Svigals] is without question the greatest living exponent of the klezmer fiddle.”
-Seth Rogovoy, author of The Essential Klezmer