UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra presents a new concert series Great Voices dedicated to stellar vocalists. The premiere in October 2020 brings the Israeli jazz singer and composer Efrat Alony to perform in Finland for the very first time.
For the special program New Jewish Folk Songs Efrat Alony has chosen her favorite Israeli standards composed between the 1920s up to contemporary Israeli music, to be masterfully arranged and reshaped by UMO Helsinki’s chief conductor and artistic director, American-Austrian Ed Partyka.
Alony, who now lives in Berlin, has fascinated the European press for many years. She has been crowned “one of the most important voices in the German jazz scene”. Her music has been called “popular art songs, highly expressive”, others speak of “pop songs that mysteriously come out of jazz” or “a chamber-jazz parallel world”. Trying to put Alony’s music in a box is a task destined to fail. Every musical compartment would simply be too small. Her ability to compose and sing in between the musical genres – both in Hebrew and English – in her exceptional unique style is what makes her stand out and shine.
Partyka’s orchestral finesse and the wide ranged temperament of the songs presented provide the perfect canvas for Alony’s strong, soulful and deep voice, with its marvelous shape-shifting abilities, to slip in and out of different characters and emotions.
The arrangements for the UMO concerts are exceptional: tickets are sold for only 200 people, and the audience is seated in the Savoy’s auditorium for 750 people with fair safety intervals.