Klezmer music can be found in bits and pieces in jazz, blues, ragtime and bluegrass. But rarely is it put on display full force, both haunting and joyful, as it was at the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival's "Klezmer Concertos" at the Katz Performing Arts Center in Squirrel Hill Tuesday night.

	Violinist Jennifer Ross offered fine solo work during a reading of Sholom Aleichem's short story "The Fiddle."

This was the classical side of klezmer, using the resources of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a chamber music format. PSO resident conductor Lucas Richman conducted and provided two serviceable arrangements of hallmark Jewish melodies -- "Kol Nidre" and "Hatikvah" among them -- to open and close the program in celebratory style.

But he also plumbed the musical riches and memories that Jewish composers have to offer. Perhaps most intriguing was the world premiere of Petr Pokorny's instrumental arrangement of Hans Krasa's "Brundibar: Suite for Ensemble."

Krasa, whose early symphonic work was performed by Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony in 1926, composed the children's opera "Brundibar" for a contest in Czechoslovakia. The contest was interrupted by the Nazi invasion, and the opera received its premiere in a Prague orphanage. But it gained notoriety when it was performed 55 times in a concentration camp several years later.

Since there was no dramatic explanation of the opera in the program, the various movements appeared to be disjointed at times. But the musical character stood on its own -- sparkling, vivacious and colorful, touching on obvious moods in an inventive and mesmerizing fashion. The concluding triumphant march only underscored the fact that Krasa died at Auschwitz in 1944.

The most obvious klezmer connections came in the first half, when clarinetist Amitai Vardi performed "The Klezmer's Wedding" by Srul Irving Glick. With a small but well-focused tone, he played an enormous glissando at the start, then launched into a tone poem of sorts, with melodies that were original but seemed so familiar.

Glick's syncopated spirits captured the hypnotic dance element of good klezmer music, and audience members could be seen moving in concert, feet tapping, heads bobbing.

Narrator Reuben Silver offered Sholom Aleichem's short story "The Fiddle," with music by Elliot Finkel and fine solo work by violinist Jennifer Ross. An actor of considerable animated charm and chameleon-like vocal expertise, Silver told the story of a man who must choose between music and the strict religious traditions held by his family.

Cellist Aron Zelkowicz was also in an upbeat mode with Joel Hoffman's "Self-Portrait with Gebirtig." Each of the three movements used a melody by Mordecai Gebirtig, a Yiddish poet and well-known folk musician who died in Poland in 1942. Although Zelkowicz held back at the start, the opening movement featured a soulful bending of notes coupled with deliciously large intervals. He then eased into the solemn second movement and went on to create atmospheric cadenzas in the virtuosic third movement, concluding the piece with considerable flair.

The final performance of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival, "Chamber Music From the Old World," features members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and guests and will be held at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Rodef Shalom Congregation. Tickets: $12-$15; 412-394-3353.