Passionate, mournful, exuberant Klezmer and Yiddish songs played with violin, tsimbl, accordion, bass and vocals. Each track introduced by Miriam Margolyes; music from and inspired by the audio drama The Witches of Lublin, starring Tovah Feldshuh. Many photos, info about the music, artist biographies and original Yiddish lyrics, all translated into English, German, French and Spanish. The album is thus more of a documentary perhaps, but the music itself is truly wonderful – klezmer and Yiddish folksongs played on violin, tsimbl (the dulcimer-like cimbalom), accordion, bass, and with many tracks benefitting from the vocals of Elizabeth Schwartz. Wild, uplifting or deeply melancholy, this music is of great interest to all klezmer enthusiasts… – R2 Magazine “Hosted by Miriam Margolyes” reads the cover of this CD, and hers is the voice on the first track welcoming us in. A nice idea, and very appropriate, since the repertoire on this recording was based on the radio drama The Witches of Lublin. It’s not generally known that in late-18th-century Poland there were women klezmer musicians who travelled to perform at fairs all over Central Europe. Ethnographer-violinist Yale Strom has researched their repertoire exhaustively, and here – with his klezmer group Hot Pstromi – he presents a few of his trouvailles, some of which have a poignant history. One dance tune was collected from a Jewish barrel-maker by Menachem Kipnis, who died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942; another was collected from a Jewish baker in Kiev in 1937. One poem was found by Strom in a folder in the archives of a library in Vilnius: it had been lodged there by the Yiddish folklorist Yehudah Leib Cahan before he emigrated to America, and tells of the plight of a young Jewish girl in Vilna, as the armies of Germany and the Soviet Union were advancing on the city. Another song Cahan collected reflects the klezmer musicians’ traditional money problems in the shtetls, where their status was – despite their music’s popularity – at the bottom of the social heap. The spoken commentary by Margolyes and Strom works well, with the music itself achingly genuine. And that is thanks to the musical integrity of the performers: the husky sound of Elizabeth Schwartz, a one-time collaborator with Muzsiukas; the dexterity of Alexander Fedoriouk, whose playing of the cimbalom began with village weddings in the Carpathian Mountains; plus Roger Sprocket on bass, and Peter Stan on accordion. – The Scotsman