PERFORMING ARTS

-- Catherine P. Lewis

Harmonia

The sixth annual Washington Jewish Music Festival concluded on Wednesday evening with a celebratory concert that looked not forward but backward, to klezmer music's roots.

At the D.C. Jewish Community Center's Goldman Theater, the Cleveland-based band Harmonia spurred toe tapping and hand clapping with Eastern European folk music.

For more than an hour, Harmonia's virtuosic musicians spun through melodies and songs from Romania, Ukraine, Croatia and Slovakia.

Using various combinations of instruments -- violin, accordion, cimbalom (a 250-pound predecessor of the hammered dulcimer), flutes, string bass and voices -- Harmonia generated music ranging from the pastoral setting of a lonesome shepherd's flute tune to the rhythmic evocation of a rustic circle dance.

Alexander Fedoriouk hammered his trapezoidal cimbalom with impressive velocity, while Marko Dreher played his violin with songful passion. Andrei Pidkivka breezed through fast passages on a number of ethnic flutes, but he was most winning playing plaintive melodies on the nai , or pan flute, and the tylynka , a long, slender shepherd's flute with no finger holes.

Beata Begeniova sang with much spirit and spunk. Her cinnamon-flecked alto was as frolicsome in the Gypsy songs on the program as it was poignant in a traditional wedding song from eastern Slovakia.

Walt Mahovlich, who founded the ensemble in 1992, played his accordion sensitively and kept the audience well informed about the program's music.

The evening began with a rousing klezmer music performance by the Alexandria Kleztet.

-- Grace Jean