Shabbat Island Discs with Sam Cohen

Choral Service led by Rabbi Charley Baginsky, with the KLS Choir, and featuring Sam Cohen – former LJY Netzer movement worker – who will reveal his choice of music as part of our regular Shabbat Island Discs feature, which takes place on the fourth Friday night of each month.

Our “Shabbat Island Discs” services are proving popular, with record attendances at the first four in the series (sorry about the pun).

The idea is based on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, where a guest chooses their favourite pieces of music and explains what they have meant in their life.

We have a mixture of outside guests and “celebrities” from within KLS.  Our castaway in June is Rabbi Pete Tobias.

If you would like to volunteer as a castaway and select the music either recorded or for the choir to sing, contact the Synagogue Office.  There are spaces from July onwards. You can even accompany the choir if you play an instrument.

The choir do their best to learn a new tune or two for the occasion. They excelled in January when Sandra tracked down the singer and then the composer of one of Craig’s choices (identified on a YouTube clip), got him to email the sheet music for the choir to learn, accompanied by Liz on the piano, all in the space of a week.

Music chosen so far

Paul Levene
Former KLS Chair and music  connoisseur

Bendigamos, a Sephardi after meal blessing sung in Spanish by Lisa Hirsch
Cantor Emile Ziahan of the Sephardi Synagogue in Ashkelon, Israel, singing a liturgical piece in the Morrocan style
Abbodah (worship) by Ernest Bloch, written for a very young Yehudi Menuhin
Yism’chu sung by Yitzchak Meir Helfgot with Itzhak Perlman on violin (from the album Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul)

Cantor Gershon Silins
Cantor for the Liberal Judaism Rabbinic Team

Shalom Aleichem (arrangement by Michael Isaacson)
Ahavat Olam (arr. Sol Zim)
V’shamru (arr. Goldstein)
Shalom Rav (arr. Ben Steinberg)
Adon Olam (arr. Charles Osborne)

(all sung by Gershon with the KLS choir)

Gabriel Webber
Final year student at Sussex University and Headteacher of Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue

Instant Concert by Harold Walters
The Daleks by Murray Gold
Hariyu by Rina Epstein
The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer
Hashikvenu by Dan Nichols
Gabriel also played clarinet on V’shamru (arr. Debbie Friedman) and Adon Olam (traditional Yiddish folk tune Ale Brider).

Craig Simmons
KNB editor and KLS Council member

My Song by Basya Schechter (from the album Songs of Wonder—musical settings for early Yiddish poetry of the philosopher and social activist Rabbi Abraham Heschel)
Lev Tahor (Psalm 51:12-13 set to music by Simchah Soloveitchik arranged and performed by Sappir, a group formed by Rabbis Danny Bergson and Mitchell Goodman, from the album Echoes)
Adon Olam—salsa arrangement by Cantor Gastón Bogomolni from the album Ta’am Latino: The Latin American Shabbat
Vaychulu (arr. Meir Finkelstein) sung by the KLS choir

Mary Simmons
KLS Funeral Secretary

The Representation of Chaos —Prelude to The Creation by Joseph Haydn