Poetic Yiddish art songs to poems by Y.L. Peretz depicting the relationship between mother and child.

Moshe Milner (1886-1953) was a Russian-Jewish composer and pianist who was fully committed to his Jewish heritage. He was a member of the St. Petersburg Jewish Folk Music Society founded in 1908. His music, characterized by his use of Yiddish speech patterns, is imbued with the spirit of Eastern European Judaism.

Milner composed his “Vocal Suite to Y.L. Peretz’s Ten Children’s Songs” for voice and piano in 1916.
After the separate publications of the songs in 1919, the complete song cycle was published by Kultur Lige – Meluche Farlag, Kiev in 1921. Later the song cycle was translated into Russian and published under a different title, “Мать и дитя” (Mat’ i ditya / Mother and Child), which led to some confusion in the cataloging of the work.

Milner was born in Ratkine (Kiev), Ukraine, as Moses Mikhail Melnikov. At the synagogue in Kiev he studied with cantors Nissan Belser and Jakov Morogovsky, and he started his piano studies with the choirmaster Abram Dzimitrovsky. He continued his piano studies at Kiev Conservatory and St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition with Anatoly Lyadov and Maximilien Steinberg (1907-15).

Visit our page on Bandcamp to listen and read about the songs, lyrics and composer. 

Musicians’ short resumes

Sovali (Sofie van Lier) has been working with Paul Prenen for many years, and they form an ideal musical partnership. They joined forces on recordings of songs by Bernard van Dieren, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and composers of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, Joseph Achron, Mikhail Gnesin, Moshe Milner, Alexander Veprik, and Alexander Krein.

We recorded Milner’s song cycle “Vocal Suite to Y.L. Peretz’s Ten Children’s Songs” in 2005 and 2007 and it was first released in 2008 on the CD “Curtain Call for the St. Petersburg Jewish Music Society (1908) – 100th Anniversary”. The songs were remastered in 2019 for their rerelease on the web.