This endless dialogue inspired the Israeli composer Sivan Eldar, who lives in New York, and pianist Marina Kantor, who lives in Prague, to create the piano piece “Whispers and Chimes”, in which an ultramodern musical language is masterfully combined with ancient Jewish melodies. Not only does Marina play the piano masterfully, but she also searches for notes and melodies, examining and listening for the keyboard part of the piano, then for the combination of keyboard and piano strings, then for the piano strings only and even for sounds that come from the place where the public is sitting...

As a child in Kiev, Ukraine, Marina Kantor tried to suppress her Jewish roots. Confronted daily with a foreign culture, which was regardless deeply engraved in her, Marina had longed for reconciliation. On the other hand, the only sense and comfort of home she felt was hidden amongst her buried Jewish ancestry, from which she was mostly alienated by the imposing  normality of living as a Russian in Russia.  Marina lived in a world where her innate affiliation with a despised and humiliated people who howl for the salvation promised them an eternity ago, was overshadowed by the magnificent chiming of the bells of awesome, dignified churches.

Marina's anticipated musical performance, called Whispers and Chimes, is exactly about this struggle to consolidate between two worlds of identity.