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This project could not have happened without the help of the following people and organisations

Jewish East End Celebration Society and Clive Bettington,
Chayke Beruriah Wiegand,
Chaim Neslin,
Sol Banks,
Friends of Yiddish,
The Jewish Museum,
Alan and Ruth Sheldon,
Louis and Jo Diaz,
Max and Marie Bernard,
Del Nissen,
Carole Shaw,
Francis Martin,
Marie Lowe at Sam and Annie Cohen Day Centre,
Norma Cohen,
Swaledale Festival North Yorkshire
Annika Olund and Fredrik Hogberg, Nyland, Sweden

Rachel Stott was educated at Wells Cathedral School and read music at Churchill College, Cambridge. While a post-graduate student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she was commissioned by the London Park Lane Group for their 1991 Purcell Room series. Subsequent compositions have been performed at festivals in Spitalfields, Brighton, Greenwich and Isleworth, in St John’s Smith Square and St Martin-in -the Fields and abroad in Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Japan. In 2000 she produced a CD of new music, ‘Airborne’, a collection of contemporary settings of British and American poetry. In 2001 she wrote a series entitled ‘Harmony and Invention’ for BBC radio 3 which was broadcast in July of that year and rebroadcast this year. Most recently she has composed a music theatre piece for Sound Sculptures, a sequence of settings of the 16^th century poet Thomas Campion, a musical response to the medical procedure of endoscopic retrograde cholangio pancreatography, and a work of contemporary political satire ‘Notes from a Viol cabinet’ for the early music group ‘Sonnerie’. Her String Quartet No 1 Quiet Earth was commissioned for performance by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet at the 2002 Swaledale Festival.

Stephen Watts was born in London in 1952. His mother’s family came from the Swiss-Italian Alps and he has cultural roots there and in Scotland. He has lived on North Uist and in the East End of London, and has edited ‘Voices of Conscience’ (Iron Press 2995) and Mother Tongues’’ (MPT 2001). At present he is completing a bibliography of C 20^th poetry in English translation and working on a fiction and a collection of essays. He has worked extensively in schools and also in hospitals as a writer. He has published several books of poems and a new selection of recent work will be published by Aark Arts in London and Delhi shortly.

Born in New York and educated in Australia, Philip Parr studied at Sydney University and the University of New South Wales, while beginning a career in the arts, working as actor, singer, musician, dancer, composer and puppeteer. He now works as a director of opera, theatre and music theatre. From 2000- 2006 he was Director of the Swaledale Festival in Yorkshire, which presents chamber music of all genres and since 2004 he has been Director of the Bath Shakespeare Festival.
Philip has worked as Assistant Director and Staff Producer at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Bayerisches Staatsoper in Munich and was Special Projects Manager for The Garden Venture at the Royal Opera House.
From 1992 - 1997 he was the founding Artistic Director of Spitalfields Market Opera, a chamber opera house for London, where he directed the numerous productions including Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor, Salieri’s Prima la Musica poi le Parole, a children’s opera Sid the Serpent who wanted to Sing, and the world premiere of Sir Charles Mackerras’s re-orchestration of Isaac Nathan’s Don John of Austria.
Other productions include Massenet’s Manon, Madame Butterfly and Cosi fan tutte for the Barbados Festival, Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto, Tosca at Holland Park, La Traviata in Malta, Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea on tour in Scotland, and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene. He directed the world premiere of Helen of Braemore by Eddie McGuire which toured extensively in Scotland and Scandinavia. An interest in unusual and chamber repertoire has led to productions of one act operas by English composers Holst, Vaughan Williams, Stephen Storace and Handel, and cycles of the early Gluck comic operas and Offenbach one act works.
In 2000, Philip programmed and directed the company of actors who worked in the zones of the Millennium Dome, and directed two major millennium community projects in Yorkshire. Recent work includes new plays by Tony Stowers and Deborah Freeman, community plays in Thurrock and Ayr, Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda for the Sion Festival in Switzerland, as well as productions of Tosca, La Boheme, and Cosi fan tutte, Viewing the Instruments, a music and medicine collaboration toured the UK and will tour in Europe in 2008.

Neyire Ashworth is a clarinettist with a difference: as a performer “she alternates between the hyperactive and the hallucinatory” (Guardian). On the concert platform, she is equally at home as soloist and chamber musician, while in the theatre, she has worked as musician, composer and actress. During her studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, in New York and in The Netherlands, she won numerous awards and was a prize-winner in BBC’s Young Musician of the Year Competition. Her London debut was as part of the Park Lane Group’s Young Artists’ Series at the Purcell Room, South Bank. Neyire has appeared in festivals and concerts world wide. Neyire completed her acting training at The City Lit, London.
Neyire was a founder member of the Britten-Pears Ensemble and has dedicated much time to the performance of contemporary music, playing with the Cambridge New Music Players, Ixion, and Continuum Ensemble amongst others. She plays with The New London Chamber Ensemble.
Orchestral work includes guest principal appearances with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as well as work with the English Chamber Orchestra and London Mozart Players. Neyire held the post of principal clarinet with the Maracaibo Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela for several years. At present she teaches clarinet at the Junior Guildhall, London.
Neyire is researching and developing new instrumental music theatre with several new projects in the pipeline, and has worked for theatre companies including A&BC Theatre Company, The Royal National Theatre, The Besht Tellers, Opera Circus and Bamboozle Theatre Company. Her most recent appearances as actress and musician were in “The Tale That Wags The Dog” at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London, Theatre Royal, Plymouth and for the Zeitgeist Festival in Los Angeles, USA.