About us

Sutzkever Project is a piano / voice recital composed of Avrom Sutzkever's poems set to music by Olivier Milhaud.

- Mélanie Gardyn, soprano singer

- Natacha Medvedeva, pianist

- Olivier Milhaud, composer

In 2010, the composer Olivier Milhaud met the translator Batia Baum who is still today the literary adviser of the project. She made him discover the beauty of Sutzkever's poems.

In 2015, Olivier Milhaud met Mélanie Gardyn and later with Natacha Medvedeva who joined the group, Sutzkever Project was born.

From the poet’s childhood in Siberia where the light and nature inspired him through the Vilno’s ghetto to Israel, Sutzkever Project takes us into the poetic works by Abraham Sutzkever where words seem to have engulfed the outside world to make spring from the horror, nature, love, creation itself... splendor and beauty.

Farloyrene nest (abandoned nest)

The originality of Sutzkever Project

- lyrical Yiddish

- musical creation of a composer making alive the yiddish language (Darius MILHAUD's grand-nephew)

The music is inspired by the Jewish liturgy and joins in the lineage of Bloch, Ravel, Eisler, Shostakovich …

- beauty of the poems of Avrom SUTZKEVER, one of the greatest yiddish poets of the 20th century !

Grand Prize at the International Jewish Music Festival in Amsterdam

In May 2017, Sutzkever Project won the Grand Prize at the International Jewish Music Festival in Amsterdam and the special Mira Rafalowicz Award for the best Yiddish performance.

The jury report said :

The Sutzkever Project deserves the first prize because of the artistic way in which the performers brought the poetry of Sutzkever and the compositions of Olivier Milhaud to life. Singer Mélanie Gardyn sang expressively and was accompanied with exquisite finesse by pianist Natacha Medvedeva. We encourage the composer and the performers to extend this project and bring this work of beauty to the world.

So, you can understand we can't stop now...

About Sutzkever

Drawing depicting Sutzkever by his friend Marc Chagall

Sutzkever displays something of poetic hallucination... from there, one senses that his work flows with great freedom and borders seem to vanish.

There are no longer real borders between the thing and the word, between the word and the mouth, between man and matter, the self and the world...

The words deconstruct the world so it can be reborn.

A tree can be endowed with love whereas the sunset is horrifying.

Still-bitter beauty is embodied by a bee, a broken violin, the distant melody of a memory, the words of the dead or the living addressing the dead.

He questions the Yiddish poet and his language, history as it unfolds, and poetry itself… This is the source of the extreme richness of tones, subjects, forms, grammar and the creation of many neologisms.

A huge poet !

Tsvey beymer (two trees)

SUTZKEVER PROJECT Enregistrement CD