Giora Feidman
b. 1936
Argentine-born Israeli clarinetist, the self-styled “King of Klezmer (כּלי־זמר) ,” who left the Israel Philharmonic to carry klezmer to concert stages worldwide and helped drive its late-20th-century revival.
was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 into a family of klezmorim (כּלי־זמרים) — his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were wedding musicians — whose Bessarabian Jewish forebears had fled the pogroms of Chișinău around 1905. After joining the Teatro Colón orchestra at eighteen, he emigrated to Israel in 1956 and became the youngest clarinetist ever to play with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, where he stayed for nearly two decades. In the early 1970s he left to pursue klezmer as a soloist; from New York, where he was crowned the “King of Klezmer,” he carried the music onto the world’s classical concert stages, later helped seed the klezmer revival in Germany, and contributed the clarinet voice to the score of “Schindler’s List.” He founded the annual “Clarinet and Klezmer in the Galilee” master class held in Safed, Israel.