YASMIN LEVY AT CADOGAN HALL, SW1

The Times
February 26, 2010
UK

Ancestral Sephardic songs made for a potent display from the Israeli
singerClive Davis

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At one level, the Israeli singer’s message is profoundly pessimistic:
Yasmin Levy tells her audience that Ladino – the Sephardic language of
an ever-shrinking minority scattered across the globe – is doomed to
extinction. Those who use it in daily life are growing older by the
day; the younger generation, including Levy herself, has lost that
instinctive connection. Hebrew or Spanish have taken its place. Yet
she sees performances of the ancestral songs as a way of preserving
the words and imagery, and in that respect, she is winning her battle
against history.

Whether or not she needed to delve so deeply into the affinities with
flamenco has been a moot point among her admirers. Levy sometimes
seemed so eager to explore the byways of Andalusia that her voice
slipped into a shrill and overbearing tone. It was a relief to find
her reining in the excesses on her stylish new album, Sentir.

Cadogan Hall’s acoustics were not best suited to Levy’s incantatory
vibrato, but this was still a potent display from a defiantly
multicultural group that included an Armenian reeds player, Vardan
Hovanissian, and a Scottish guitarist, Cuffy Cuthbertson. If some of
the intimacy of the studio recording was lost in this spacious setting,
Levy calmly drew her audience closer with playful introductions and
translations that undercut the often melancholy and fatalistic content
of the songs themselves. "Did I make you miserable yet?" she asked
jokingly at one point. Sometimes, in fact, she tried too hard to make
us feel at home: the stark poetry of the songs – a contemporary blend
of Ladino and Spanish – works well enough on its own austere terms.

As Hovanissian and his colleagues took their concise solos, Levy
prowled the stage, essaying delicate, Zen-like dance steps. On the
serene ballad Una Pastora she was left alone on the stage as she
communed with the voice of her late father, the revered musicologist
Yitzhak Levy. Elsewhere, the soaring arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s
Hallelujah fitted neatly into the mix, and at the end the stirring
Balkan pulse of Jaco transformed the venue into something resembling
a sun-dappled village square.