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Sarah Aroeste to Release Orijinal (en bivo), Marking 25 Years as a Pioneering Voice in Ladino Music
The eleven-track live recording revisits a quarter-century of original songwriting in Ladino, the endangered Judeo-Spanish language Aroeste has spent her career proving is still very much alive.
Award-winning singer-songwriter Sarah Aroeste will release Orijinal (en bivo), a new live album revisiting eleven original Ladino compositions spanning her 25-year career, on October 23, 2026 (self release).
Orijinal (en bivo) is both a milestone and a mission statement. For 25 years, Aroeste has been one of a small handful of composers writing original new music in Ladino, the historic language of Sephardic Jews descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492, widely considered endangered today with few remaining native speakers worldwide. Where much of the surviving Ladino repertoire is folkloric or liturgical, Aroeste has built a career on a different premise: that Ladino can still generate brand-new art, written and performed by a living voice.
“Ladino is often celebrated as a language of memory. It certainly is,” Aroeste said. “But for me, it is also a language of creativity – a living language that continues to grow through the voices of those who speak, sing, write, and create in it today.”
Orijinal (en bivo) makes that case directly. Recorded in live performance at NYC’s Vibromonk Studio, the album brings together songs written across Aroeste’s career and revisited now as the body of work she considers most essential to her artistic identity. Each of the eleven tracks began, as Aroeste describes it, “with a question, image, or story I couldn’t let go of”- from the folkloric figure of the chika morena to the story of 16th-century Sephardic humanitarian Doña Grasia Nasi; from a rediscovered 16th-century ballad to a song written in the sleepless early days of motherhood. Together, the songs explore ancestry and belonging, grief and gratitude, resilience and hope.
That evolution is at the heart of Orijinal (en bivo). Aroeste’s earliest Ladino recordings were devoted to preserving Sephardic musical tradition and introducing it to new audiences. Over time, her relationship to the language shifted. “I realized that Ladino had become more than a language through which I could honor the past,” she said. “It had become the language through which I could tell my own story.”
Highlights include “Monastir,” written for the Sephardic Balkan city where Aroeste’s family lived for generations before the Holocaust; “Grasia,” an homage to Doña Grasia Nasi, who used her wealth to help Jews escape the Inquisition; “Espinelo,” for which Aroeste composed an entirely new melody for a centuries-old ballad text whose original tune had been lost to history (a gesture she describes as becoming “part of the ballad’s long history”) and “Chika Morena,” the first Ladino song Aroeste ever wrote, which set the course for everything that followed.
“People sometimes ask why I write original songs in Ladino,” Aroeste said. “The answer is simple: because this is the language in which my creativity feels most at home.”
View an interview with Sarah to find out more about Orijinal (en bivo) and her lifelong work to preserve the Ladino language and culture.
Orijinal (en bivo) will be available on all major platforms. For press materials and more information, contact Ron Kadish at ron@dogranchmusicpr.com.
About Sarah Aroeste
For more than two decades, Sarah Aroeste has been reimagining Sephardic culture for new generations. An award-winning singer/songwriter, author, educator, and cultural advocate, she brings Sephardic stories to life through original music, books, performances, and educational initiatives. Inspired by her family’s Sephardic roots in North Macedonia and Greece, she has dedicated her career to sharing the Ladino language and Sephardic culture with audiences around the world.
One of the few composers writing new music in Ladino today, Aroeste has released nine acclaimed recordings, including Monastir, her award-winning homage to the lost Sephardic Balkan city, and Savor, a collaboration with chef Susan Barocas pairing Sephardic music with culinary tradition. Her honors include the Sephardic Prize at the International Jewish Music Festival in Amsterdam, a performance at Carnegie Hall’s Migrations Festival, and the Young Leadership Award from the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America.
Aroeste is also the author of multiple Sephardic-themed children’s books distributed through PJ Library, where she mentors emerging writers through the Sephardic Stories Initiative. Through projects including the Livros Lookout book community and the Kantikas Countdown, she continues to create new opportunities for audiences of all ages to discover the richness of Sephardic culture.
Learn more at saraharoeste.com