SOUTH WINDSOR – “La Nona Kanta: The Remarkable Life of Flory Jagoda,” a live concert and multi-media presentation celebrating the work of the award-winning Sephardic singer and composer Flory Altarac Jagoda, will have its national premiere on Saturday, May 4, 8 p.m., at Temple Beth Hillel in South Windsor. The event is performed by Trio Sefardi, a Northern Virginia-based ensemble of musicians who each played with Flory, now age 95, for many years.

Jagoda, recipient of the National Heritage Award, is known worldwide as the “Keeper of the Flame” of Sephardic and Ladino music. She shares her life’s experiences and recounts how music helped her escape from Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia when she was a teenager and how she turned the tragic fate of her family and Balkan Sephardic culture into a celebration of five centuries of faith and tradition.

 “La Nona Kanta,” Spanish for “the grandmother sings,” is presented by Temple Beth Hillel’s Congregation Beth Ahm Legacy Fund, in collaboration with the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 

Trio Sefardi was founded in 2010 to celebrate and continue the legacy of Flory Jagoda and that of Sephardic communities in the Balkans and Turkey. It is comprised of West Hartford native Susan Feltman Gaeta, Flory’s former apprentice in the Virginia Humanities’ Folklife Apprenticeship Program; Howard Bass, Flory’s longtime guitar accompanist and former cultural arts manager at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; and director of the acclaimed HESPERUS ensemble Tina Chancey, who performed with Flory for over 15 years. The trio’s featured performances include the John F. Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and with Flory Jagoda at the Library of Congress. 

Tickets are $20. For more information: (860) 282-8466 and press 0, or visit tbhsw.org.

CAP: Flory Jogada. Credit: Tom Pich