Josef Bardanashvili, recipient of the 2024 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, will premiere Light to My Path a choral fantasy for mixed choir, saxophone, percussion and piano. Each movement grows from one of the various states of belief — supplication, ecstasy, doubt, gratitude — outlined in the Book of Psalms.

Bardanashvili explains, “The Psalms have been an endless source of inspiration over the centuries, and I have been working for years to set the Psalms texts to music. Every person’s spiritual condition is brilliantly conveyed in them. Since my work conveys different emotional states of a person, I tried to give each part a different accompaniment, a different colour in its performance.”

Yair Klartag, recipient of the 2024 Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music, will premiere The Parable of the Palace for choir and four double basses. The work draws on Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s (1138-1204) famous parable to investigate the limits of logic and reason in explaining reality and the metaphysical.

Klartag says, “The Parable of the Palace appears at the end of the Guide for the Perplexed, an amazing book by Maimonides in which he tried to reconcile Aristotelian logic and reason with the Jewish beliefs. It tells the story of a palace, in which a mysterious king lives. There are different groups of people in different circles around the palace in different proximity to the king. The piece takes from the parable its geometric organization: in the core, there is the irrational — what goes beyond reason — and around it, different circles with varying distances from the irrational. The inner circles are the circles of logic and science. This image of circles surrounding an irrational core inspired the structure of the piece – the music spirals and circles around a very abstract material built from [the sounds of] low double basses and spectral textures hovering in the choir.”

Jordan Nobles, recipient of the 2024 Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music, has composed kanata for SATB Voices a cappella, a tribute to the Canadian landscape inspired by Nobles’s own travels.

Nobles says, “I wanted to reflect the vastness of Canada’s diverse landscapes and the complex histories attached to these places, particularly the Indigenous place names that existed long before colonial settlement. My goal was to create a work that celebrates these original names by using fragments of their sounds, to form a collage of phonemes that evoke the essence of place. Rather than depicting landscapes like mountains or rivers in a literal way, I sought to express the feeling of being in these environments —the stillness, awe, and reverence they inspire. By using shifting textures and layers of sound, I aimed to capture the immensity and intimacy of the Canadian landscape, as well as the personal connection each of us has to the places we call home.”

Juan Trigos, recipient of the inaugural 2024 Azrieli Commission for International Music, will premiere Simetrías Prehispánicas, for chorus, amplified flute, trombone, percussion and keyboards. The work pays homage to the cultural history of his native Mexico.

Trigos explains, “In Simetrías Prehispánicas, I used a libretto created by my father, Juan Trigos Sr., in which he employs fragments of original texts in Spanish and Nahuatl by anonymous and known poets of the 15th century, arranging them to create a new work. The music is built from the text and its parts: their sonority, intrinsic rhythm (symmetries and reiterations), punctuation and meaning. The chorus is the protagonist.”