Biography

Lloica Czackis was born in 1973 in Karlsruhe, Germany, to Argentinian parents. Growing up in Venezuela, she became acquainted with the Latin American folk musical traditions, playing and singing it in her musical family. She then studied singing with Ana Sirulnik and choral conducting at the Argentine Catholic University in Buenos Aires and completed her training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London with Vera Rosza and David Pollard, supported by a British Council/Fondo Nacional de la Artes scholarship.

A versatile artist, Lloica Czackis performs music from the Renaissance to the avant-garde and from folk to tango, including oratorio, opera, and works written especially for her. She has appeared in the main European festivals of contemporary music with the New London Chamber Choir, also as a soloist. In 2001 she toured the USA in London City Opera’s production of Carmen. She has given recitals and solo performances, in Argentina, at the Salón Dorado of the Buenos Aires Town Hall, Teatro Colón, La Scala de San Telmo and the Centro Cultural Recoleta; in the UK, at St-Martin-in-the-Fields, Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, Fairfield Halls, Lauderdale House, Bolivar Hall, Canning House, The Spitz and Guilford Cathedral; and also in Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and Vienna.

Since 1999 Lloica has conceived and performed programmes on Latin American and European 20th Century music, tango, Yiddish song and cabaret. Her Millennium Award-winning show Tangele: The Pulse of Yiddish Tango features songs from European ghettos and concentration camps and from the Yiddish Theatre in Buenos Aires and New York. With arrangements by the renowned composer Gustavo Beytelmann, also on piano, and joined by Juan Lucas Aisemberg on viola, Tangele was premièred on 9 November 2002 at The Spitz, in the East End of London, and has since appeared in numerous venues and international festivals across Europe.

In 2003 she performed with the international Yiddish music specialist and pianist Zalmen Mlotek in the launch of the International Forum for Yiddish Culture in London, and also as an actress and singer in the theatre play Davka by Jane Liddell-King, at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge, UK. She also premièred Terezín Karussell, a recital of art and cabaret songs by Terezín composers written before and in the ghetto, with David Bloch on piano, at the Brundibár Festival in Manchester in September 2003. She later repeated this programme with pianists Miriam Brickman and Andrew Quartermain in London and at the 2004 Leamington Festival, UK.

In addition to her musical career, Lloica researches the Yiddish tango. She has presented her work in the UK magazine Jewish Quarterly (Vol. 50 No. 1 (189) Spring 2003), in the book Recreando la Cultura Judeoargentina/2- Literatura y Artes Plásticas (Editorial Milá, Buenos Aires, 2004) and in illustrated lectures across the UK, at Limmud, Davar, Klezmer in Sheffield, the Council of Christians and Jews, the Holocaust Survivors' Centre, the Bosnian Jewish Refugee Centre, the Institute of Latin American Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has also written articles on Argentine Jewish musicians. Lloica is the 2004/5 Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and completed a DEA (MPhil) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, in 2005.

Her latest CD, "Le Grand Tango", with he UK-based group "El Ultimo Tango", is dedicated to the music of Astor Piazzolla and British tango composers.

Lloica Czackis is also the co-founder and co-director of Valiske, an non-for-profit association based in Alsace, France, that organises Jewish heritage tours around the world.