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For Jerusalem's culture aficionados, spring means the annual Israel Festival, which starts this year on May 25 and runs through June 11. The multidisciplinary arts festival, which started as a classical music showcase in 1961, became headquartered in Jerusalem in 1982. Today the festival encompasses dance, music, theater and the visual arts components, and it brings cultural figures from around the globe - including, this year, Israeli-born conductor Itzhak Perlman and the famed American Bill T. Jones Dance Company - to the Israeli capital for two and a half weeks of highbrow cultural heaven.

The 2010 incarnation of the festival is dedicated to past cultural icons who continue to inform art being made today, and as such will have many shows dedicated to Shakespeare, S.Y. Agnon, poet Natan Alterman and the like. Special series of performances are also set to focus on jazz (don't forget to check out major ticketing discounts - up to half off - on the festival's impressive jazz shows, available exclusively to GoJerusalem users), Israel's place in the World Music scene and children.

For festival openers the New Jerusalem Orchestra, the connection to the past is epitomized in music which melds contemporary jazz and Miggle Eastern ethnic folk music with the ancient piutim, Jewish poems often sung as part of the prayer services, which will be sung by noted piut expert Rabbi Haim Louk (pictured, with microphone).

GoJerusalem.com recently spoke with Yair Harel (pictured, with drum), who, together with Omer Avital, serves as the ensemble's Artistic Director. "For us, performing at the Israel Festival with Rabbi Louk is significant both symbolically and in the wide audience it allows us to reach," he said. "We are performing a very special and significant form of Jewish Israeli art. The piutim which we will be performing are usually connected to something very traditional, or to a specific population group, and performing at the Israel Festival allows us to connect with a young generation of Israeli audiences."

Indeed, festival organizers are hoping to attract a young adult audience as well, with events like Marsh Dondurma's open-air jazz concert at the Alrov Mamilla Avenue, the Musrara Mix alternative arts festival, a wine tasting at the Botanical Gardens, and several events like the New Jerusalem Orchestra concert, which mix contemporary Israeli world music with traditional music paradigms.

As Harel told GoJerusalem.com, "All of us in the New Jerusalem Orchestra are very connected to contemporary music but also are very influenced by traditional music. This melding of the two musical strains may represent the future or hope for a deeper Israeli culture, and Jerusalem is the most appropriate place for this to happen. Jerusalem is a place of connection. It is a place of tradition, where creativity is connected to continuity.

"That's what we are trying to do with our music. We're offering a new concept of Jerusalem that brings the ancient and contemporary together - we are combining classical Eastern music with a string quartet with a brass trio and a choir and writing music that is deeply connected to tradition but at the same time sounds totally new. Our audiences are going to hear a type of music they've never heard before."

The New Jerusalem Orchestra will perform on May 25th and 26th at the Jerusalem Theatre's Rebecca Crown Auditorium.