Sidor Belarsky

Sidor Belarsky, born Isidor Livshitz on December 27, 1898, in Kryzhopil, Ukraine, was an American opera singer, educator, and interpreter of Judaic folk songs, Chassidic Nigunim, and cantorial music. He died on June 7, 1975, at North Shore Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, at the age of 77.

Belarsky received his early musical training at the Odessa Conservatory and in Berlin before graduating from the State Conservatory at Leningrad in 1929. Following his graduation, he performed as a soloist with the Kirov Opera company and as a leading basso with the Leningrad State Opera Company. He emigrated to the United States in February 1930 or 1931, traveling with his wife Clarunia and daughter Isabel. Upon arrival, the family was detained at Ellis Island because the United States had not established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union at that time.

After settling in the United States, Belarsky was invited by Franklin S. Harris to join the faculty at Brigham Young University, where he taught vocal music from 1930 to 1933. He also held a faculty position at the University of Utah. From 1932 to 1936 he was based in Los Angeles, where he performed with the Los Angeles Symphony at the Hollywood Bowl in productions of Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin and founded the American Opera Company. He later joined the faculty of the Jewish Teachers Seminary – Herzliah Institute in New York City as Professor of Music, a position he held while continuing to concertize internationally.

Throughout his career, Belarsky performed with several major operatic companies, including the Chicago Civic Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the American Opera Company of Los Angeles, and the New York City Center Opera, where he appeared in a production of Tosca in 1944. In South America, he performed at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Between 1931 and 1961, he gave more than 22 solo performances at Carnegie Hall in New York City. He also appeared with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini in a performance of Beethoven's Fidelio.

Belarsky's Broadway career spanned 1944 to 1945, during which he appeared in revivals of operas by Giacomo Puccini at the Center Theatre. His Broadway credits include La Bohème, La Tosca, and Flying Dutchman.

During the 1930s, Belarsky joined other leading cantors in concert performances aimed at raising funds for the Zionist cause as Nazi persecution intensified in Germany. In 1948 he performed in Israel during the celebrations surrounding its founding, and in 1951 he contributed to the documentary film Shalom Israel. The 1949–1950 concert season took him to South Africa and Israel, where he performed a repertoire of Jewish folk music, and he returned to South Africa during the 1957–1958 season for recitals of Yiddish and Hebrew songs. In 1954 he performed at New York City's Town Hall in a concert sponsored by the Association to Perpetuate the Memory of Ukrainian Jews.

During the 1940s, Belarsky recorded Ukrainian and Russian folk songs for the RCA Victor label in collaboration with accordionist John Serry and the Mischa Borr Orchestra. Those recordings include "Dark Night" (No. 26-5037, 1946) by Nikita Bogoslovsky, "By the Cradle" (No. 26-5035, 1946) by Aleksandre Alekseevich Olenin, "Katusha" (No. 26-5035, 1946) by Hy Zaret, and "Hobo Song" (No. 26-5037, 1946) by Valerii Viktorovich Zhelobinsky. His broader discography encompasses more than 75 recordings of Judaic folk songs on labels including RCA Victor, Artistic Enterprises, and Besa Records. Among his notable recordings is "Dem Milners Trern," a Yiddish folk song by M. M. Warshavsky first recorded for Victor in 1938 and re-released on RCA Victor in 1947, which was later featured in the Coen Brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man. The song addresses the expulsion of Jews from villages in Czarist Russia. As a concert encore, Belarsky frequently performed "Mayn rueh plats" by the poet Morris Rosenfeld.

Along with Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker, Belarsky has been credited with preserving Yiddish folk songs through performance and recording during the twentieth century. His admirers included Albert Einstein, Israeli President Zalman Shazar, and Elie Wiesel. Archival collections of his papers, photographs, and recordings are held at Brigham Young University's L. Tom Perry Special Collections, the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive at Dartmouth College, the Florida Atlantic University Library, the National Library of Israel, and the Discography of American Historical Recordings at the University of California, Santa Barbara.