Felix Mendelssohn. Arnold Schoenberg. Kurt Weill. Leonard Bernstein. All enduringly familiar names in music — and all Jewish. While current events involving the State of Israel’s aggression in the Middle East are in the spotlight, three upcoming concerts in Burlington turn the focus to music by Jewish composers. Their programs serve as reminders that many such works, whether sacred or secular, are admired and beloved across borders and by musicians, audiences and composers of every background.
This week’s performances are a voice recital exploring Jewish diaspora music and a chorus’ appeal for peace. Calais soprano Mary Bonhag will give the recital, accompanied by Burlington composer Michael Schachter on piano, at Ohavi Zedek synagogue on Thursday, May 28. And on Saturday and Sunday, May 30 and 31, the Vermont Choral Union will perform “Sim Shalom (Grant Us Peace): 400 Years of Jewish Sacred Music” at the College Street Congregational Church and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, respectively.
Bonhag, described by Classical Voice North America as having a “bright, pure, absurdly accurate instrument,” shaped her recital program around “Six Popular Sephardic Songs” by Joaquín Nin-Culmell, a 1982 work she described as having “Spanish and Jewish flair.” Bonhag has been wanting to perform the set for years, she said in a recent call.
Nin-Culmell, a Catholic born in Germany to Cuban parents, moved permanently to the U.S. in 1939 at age 31. His work arranges six songs by Sephardic Jews, who flourished in the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule but experienced restrictions under the Christians. After the latter expelled them in the late 15th century, they scattered to Greece, Morocco and other Mediterranean locales. The composer dedicated the work to all suffering Jews. Five songs are in the Sephardic language of Ladino, and one is in Hebrew.
Bonhag said she enjoys the songs’ melismatic flourishes — the equivalent of quick little grace notes on a piano — and use of the augmented second, a characteristic sound of Middle Eastern music. The songs’ lack of tempo and dynamic markings allows her a freedom of interpretation, and the range of topics will show off her voice, from a “very nasal and brassy” song about a mother-in-law to the “solidity” of one about Moses’ tablets.
Shaping her program around the set, Bonhag chose a range of other works by Jewish composers, including “Hillula,” a 2008 exploration of Jewish mysticism by New York City composer Judd Greenstein; and songs by Weill, who fled Nazi Germany, from his late 1940s opera and Broadway shows. She’ll also sing a composition by Schachter called “Pierrot (Heart)” — a 2011 setting of the eponymous Langston Hughes poem.
According to Bonhag, who grew up attending a Protestant congregational church in Ascutney, “It’s special for me as a non-Jew to sing [this program] in a synagogue.”
Her recital is part of a concert series that Schachter, an Ohavi Zedek board member, launched in fall 2024 to support its Full Circle Preschool. The busy composer, whose collaborative work The Black Clown just had a run at Opera Philadelphia, schedules concerts when he has time. He has presented a range of artists, including experimental cellist Zoë Keating, Shelburne pianist Paul Orgel playing a classical program and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium-Musicum choir. His goal, he said, is to provide the synagogue with “a rich cultural life and bring in all members of the community, whether Jewish or not.”
Meanwhile, the Vermont Choral Union’s program is a survey of mainly sacred Jewish music, ranging from 17th-century composer Salamone Rossi to Ben Steinberg, who died in 2023. A highlight will be Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, a 20-minute work from 1965. The 47-member chorus will use Bernstein’s chamber orchestration for accompaniment: two organists — choral director Eric Milnes and St. Paul’s organist Peter Berton — with Heidi Soons on harp and D. Thomas Toner on percussion.
For the occasion, Milnes is passing the wand to assistant conductor Cole Marino, who advocated for programming Bernstein’s whole work instead of selections from it. Like Bonhag, Marino is not Jewish. But, as the Williston tenor said by phone, he “fell down a rabbit hole of Bernstein’s music” while studying voice performance at Manhattan School of Music. “I’m a fan of his work; how could you not be?” he said. “His writing feels very contemporary; it has a very long gaze.”
Chichester Psalms, which draws from the Book of Psalms in the original Hebrew, is one of Bernstein’s most overtly Jewish compositions — and unusually so for a composer whose works ranged from Broadway shows to Mass, a theatrical interpretation of the Catholic liturgy in Latin.
Recent events in the Middle East altered the chorus’ program by shifting the emphasis to peace.
Marino noted that, in Chichester, Bernstein “juxtaposes the texts in such a meaningful way to ask questions and profess his faith, dialoguing with God.” All is resolved in the finale, from Psalm 133, which declares “how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”
“This is in 1965, 20 years after the [concentration] camps are liberated,” Marino noted. He added that the chorus’ program creates a through line from two works by composer Emanuel Kirschner to that moment. Kirschner was the cantor in Munich’s main synagogue, which was the first that Adolf Hitler ordered demolished during the Holocaust; Kirschner sang the final prayer inside the night before it was torn down in June 1938.
Marino said recent events in the Middle East altered the chorus’ program by shifting the emphasis to peace — in both the program title and certain selections. Press materials suggest that “these works illuminate our historical understanding and provide a new context for our present.”
And both concerts will offer something else: pure enjoyment. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Raising Their Voices | Three concerts in Burlington seek to unite listeners through Jewish music”
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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