Hannie Ricardo is an Israeli singer and educator, who along with her wide-ranging concert activity, teaches singing, and voice preservation for teachers and performers.
Over the course of nearly three decades, Ricardo has established her place in Israeli musical life. She has performed in a variety of musical settings: chamber music concerts, private and diplomatic events, and more. She has sung in festivals such as the International Music Festival in Wuxi, China; the Religious Music Festival in Białystock, Poland; the International Music Festival in Never, France; and more –throughout Israel, the Far East, and Europe.
Ricardo’s large and colorful repertoire ranges from classical art songs of the 19th and 20th centuries, through musicals and folk music, to jazz and cabaret. She is known for her performances of Jewish repertoire, which includes Israeli classics alongside Yiddish and Ladino songs. Her CD, A Jewish Song Book, recorded at the Castello di San Paolo in Rosso, Tuscany, was dedicated to this repertoire. She is currently at work on a CD of Hebrew songs with newly-composed music.
Ricardo is one of very few singers who perform the extraordinary music of Jewish composers who perished in the Holocaust. For many years she has given her annual lecture-recital, “The Terezín Ghetto Composers.” In Israel, she has performed the program at Jerusalem University and Haifa University, and abroad for diplomatic missions in Germany and the Czech Republic. She performs it particularly in mid-October, the anniversary of the mass deportations from the ghetto to Auschwitz. In this way she can celebrate these composers' lives and art.
Ricardo trained at the Music Academy of Tel Aviv University; along with voice she studied piano and musicology. Her voice teachers included the famous soprano Margherita Rinaldi, Leonardo Wolovski, and Mira Zakai, among others.
Ricardo holds a bachelors in Jewish history. In 2011 she was the winner of the Yad vaShem (the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, Israel) award for her research on the Terezín Ghetto Composers.
Barry David Salwen is an associate professor of music at UNCW, where he joined the faculty in 1992. He is an international concert pianist, giving performances and master classes in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Asia, including two weeks of master classes at the Shanghai Conservatory in China, among many others. As the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars Grant, he gave a semester’s seminar at the Music Conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, one of the leading music institutions in the country. His master classes at UNCW have been attended by students from throughout eastern North Carolina. Among Salwen’s nine CDs is the first recording of the complete solo piano music of the American master Roger Sessions; he is the first artist to record all of these works. First published on Koch International Classics, the recording was subsequently reissued on Albany Records. His recording of Sessions’s piano concerto is also planned to appear on Albany.