The Peacock and the Sunflower, the latest album by the Berkeley klezmer trio Veretski Pass, is something of a miracle, showcasing dozens of tunes gleaned from an archive of manuscripts collected in Ukraine and Belarus in the decades before World War II by educator and musician Zinovy Kiselgof and violinist Avrom-Yeshiye Makonovetsky.
Long assumed to be irretrievably lost under Stalin, the treasure trove resurfaced about 30 years ago. The manuscripts and some historical recordings continue to be held in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv, under constant threat since the 2022 Russian invasion of that country, and Veretski Pass has been involved in an international effort by musicians and scholars to digitize and disseminate the sheet music.
Inspired by the online publication of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), The Peacock and the Sunflower brings these tunes gloriously to life. And on Friday, April 11, at Fifth Street Farms, a long-running house-concert venue in West Berkeley, Veretski Pass interpreted the music with the expert calibration of a chamber ensemble and the joyful brio of a wedding band.
Which isn’t to say the repertoire on The Peacock and the Sunflower is dance music per se. In the hands of Cookie Segelstein on violin, Stuart Brotman on bass, Joshua Horowitz on 19th-century button accordion, and frequent Veretski collaborator Joel Rubin on clarinet, this alternative branch of secular Ashkenazi music feels more like intricate etudes, with dizzying skeins of notes ascending from Brotman’s mobile arco bass lines. This is music that requires virtuosity as well as ruach, and Friday’s performance featured both consummate musicianship and bountiful spirit.
Representing centuries of intermingled Jewish (peacock) and Ukrainian (sunflower) culture, the album seamlessly blends tunes from the KMDMP archives, traditional Ukrainian melodies, and Segelstein’s original compositions. Her father grew up in the vicinity of the Veretski Pass in the Carpathian Mountains, and she was weaned on similar music in a community of Holocaust survivors in Kansas City.
At Fifth Street Farms, the tunes, delivered in a series of seven- to 10-minute medleys, covered an expansive swath of emotional and stylistic territory, often evoking contradictory feelings with a single phrase. Playing one of her own melodies, “Dov’s Table,” Segelstein, over an accordion drone, conjured a closely observed tableau of her father at work.
Rubin, a researcher at the University of Bern’s Institute of Musicology and Institute of Jewish Studies, was in town from Switzerland, and his interplay with Segelstein and Horowitz was often astounding. Adding the clarinet to the trio’s sturdy dynamic sends the group’s balance in fascinating directions, as Brotman is left alone at the bottom, anchoring and propelling the ensemble with his deft bow work.
The presence in the audience of Martin Schwartz, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley, where he taught for four decades, seemed particularly appropriate for the occasion. His collection of 78-rpm records (which supplied the material for the later anthology album Klezmer Music: Early Yiddish Instrumental Music: The First Recordings 1908–1927) played an essential role in the klezmer revival of the mid-1970s. The movement was sparked by The Klezmorim, the Berkeley ensemble that Brotman elevated in the late ’70s. With The Peacock and the Sunflower, the conversation with a lost world continues to sound creatively vital and culturally thrilling.
