Anna K. + die Hawaras - Sargfabrik - 2026

Sargfabrik - Verein für integrative Lebensgestaltung, Wien

Anna K. & the Hawaras blend klezmer, jazz, Ukrainian soundscapes, and contemporary Viennese music into an open musical dialogue. As part of the “Spot on Yiddish Divas” series, the Yiddish Culture Festival Vienna presents a concert evening that bridges Jewish tradition, Eastern European folk music, and the freedom of improvisation.

Singer and saxophonist Anna Kypiatkova was born in southern Ukraine into a Jewish family where music was a natural part of everyday life. Yiddish songs, klezmer melodies, and the emotional power of this music shaped her from an early age. Later, she studied at the Jazz Institute of the Kiev Music Academy and developed her own musical language that blends jazz, klezmer, and improvised music.

Together with the Hawaras, she has created a program that views klezmer as a living and evolving form of music: rooted in the Eastern European Jewish tradition while remaining open to Balkan rhythms, dance music, and contemporary influences. Well-known repertoire meets new arrangements, spontaneous improvisations, and a deliberately raw, unmediated energy.

On stage, Ukrainian musicians who have fled their homeland come together with colleagues living in Vienna. The result is not an abstract statement about integration, but an artistically lived dialogue: passionate, virtuosic, melancholic, danceable, and free. The evening becomes a musical space for encounter: between tradition and the present, between Jewish memory and Ukrainian experience, between personal history and a shared future.

Anna Kypiatkova – vocals, saxophone; Marton Papp – clarinet; Nikolaus Zierotin – violin; Richard Seniow – accordion; Dmytro Kovalenko – guitar; Marko Ferlan – double bass