2018: Kelly-Marie Murphy
En el escuro es todo uno (In the Darkness All is One)
Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music

With music described as “breathtaking” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “imaginative and expressive” (The National Post), “a pulse-pounding barrage on the senses” (The Globe and Mail), and “Bartok on steroids” (Birmingham News), Kelly-Marie Murphy’s voice is well known on the Canadian music scene. She has created a number of memorable works for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles, including the Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, The Gryphon Trio, James Campbell, Shauna Rolston, the Cecilia and Afiara String Quartets and Judy Loman.

In addition to many academic scholarships awarded in Canada and England, Dr. Murphy also has won numerous prizes for her music, including the 2017 Maria Anna Mozart Award from Symphony Nova Scotia. Her career was launched when she won first prize and the People’s Choice Award at the CBC Young Composer’s Competition in 1994 (string quartet category). Since then, Dr. Murphy’s music has been performed around the world by outstanding soloists and ensembles, and has had radio broadcasts in over 22 countries. Her music has been interpreted by renowned conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis, David Brophy, Bramwell Tovey and Mario Bernardi, and has been heard in iconic concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall in New York City and The Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna, Italy, and grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary with William Jordan and Allan Bell, and later received a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds, England, where she studied with Philip Wilby. After living and working for many years in the Washington D.C. area where she was designated “an alien of extraordinary ability” by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, she is now based in Ottawa.

Visit: www.kellymariemurphy.com

Programme notes

En el escuro es todo uno (In the Darkness All Is One)

Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna and grew up in various Canadian Armed Forces bases across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary and received her Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, England. She now lives in Ottawa, where she teaches composition and orchestration at the University of Ottawa. Murphy began accumulating prizes and awards in 1992, when she won the first annual New Works CalgaryComposers’ Competition. A quarter of a century later she has acquired some two dozen more prizes and awards from England, France, Canada and the U.S., the most recent of which is the $50,000 2018 Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music, the largest prize of its kind in Canada. Dr. Sharon Azrieli, who conceived the awards for the Azrieli Foundation, commented that Kelly-Marie Murphy is “the next vital and integral partner to our vision of sustaining the glorious continuity of Jewish music.”

Murphy’s wide-ranging catalogue includes concerted works for harp and orchestra (And Then at Night I Paint the Stars, 2002) and for cello and orchestra (This the Colour of My Dreams, 1997). Now she combines these two solo instruments in a single composition, her double concerto for harp and cello entitled En el escuro es todo uno (In the Darkness All Is One). There may not be another concerted work for this pair of instruments anywhere. Tonight’s performance marks the twenty-minute concerto’s world premiere.

The title comes from a Sephardic proverb that, in Murphy’s words, “encourages us to understand that we are all equal; once you remove the trappings of society and economy, we are more similar than we are different. Each of the four movements uses music from the Sephardic tradition as its source; specifically, Ladino [the language of Spanish and Portuguese Jews] folk songs. I chose songs that were somehow related to women’s lives and the importance of ‘mother.’ The concept can be as literal as mother to children, or as broad as Israel as the mother of the faith.”

The first movement uses a Lamenta from Bulgaria. It is “for the most part slow and lyrical,” says the composer. “The lyricism is often interrupted by a loud, rhythmic, jagged line. We register these interruptions but carry on with the progression of events. This illustrates how we are able to acknowledge and turn away from brutality and sadness in our own lives and history.” The opening words are “Mother, mother, rain falls from the heavens. Tears fall from my eyes.”

“Si veriash a la rana is a Ladino children’s song found in Turkey and the Balkans,” continues Murphy. “It is a fast, rhythmic and humorous teaching song that instructs girls how to enjoy the chores of the kitchen, reminding them that they share those chores with their sisters. Following a soloistic opening based on prayer modes, the music launches into a dance-like section that presents the folk song.”

The third movement (Yigdal No. 2) is a cadenza for the two solo instruments plus vibraphone. It is modal, but incorporates threads of the Yigdal (a liturgical prayer or hymn expressing the faith of Israel in God) as it is sung in Constantinople.

The final movement is based on two songs: Noches, noches, buenos noches a romance most likely from Sarajevo and Ven Chicka Nazlia (“Come little tease,”) a fun, flirtatious song most likely from Turkey. The movement arrives without pause, immediately following the cadenza. The first part, slow and atmospheric, consists of a canonic presentation of the theme from Noches, noches. The remainder of the movement is built on the fast and uplifting melody from Ven Chicka Nazlia.

2018: Avner Dorman
Nigunim (Violin Concerto No. 2)
Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music

Avner Dorman writes music of intricate craftsmanship and rigorous technique, expressed with a soulful and singular voice. A native of Israel now living in the United States, Dorman draws on a variety of cultural and historical influences in composing, resulting in music that affects an emotional impact while exploring new territories. His works utilize an exciting and complex rhythmic vocabulary, as well as unique timbres and colours in orchestral, chamber, and solo settings. The world’s finest orchestras, conductors and soloists perform Dorman’s music and many of his compositions have become contemporary staples in the repertoire. Dorman’s music is championed by conductors such as Zubin Mehta, Ricardo Chailly and Andris Nelsons, and by soloists Gil Shaham, Martin Grubinger and Hilary Hahn.  Along with Nigunim, Dorman’s 2018-19 season features several other exciting premieres, including Eternal Rhythm, a new percussion concerto for Simone Rubino and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, and a new violin concerto for Sayaka Shoji.

Dorman’s music has garnered numerous awards and prizes. His debut opera, Wahnfried, was named a finalist in the category of World Premiere at the International Opera Awards. At the age of 25, Dorman became the youngest composer to win Israel’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for his Ellef Symphony. He since has earned several international awards from ASCAP, ACUM and the Asian Composers League.

Dorman is an active conductor. He is currently music director of CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra. He holds a doctorate in composition from Juilliard and serves as Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College.

Visit:  www.avnerdormanmusic.com

Score and parts for Nigunim are available from G. Schirmer

Programme notes

Nigunim

The Israeli-born composer Avner Dorman received his master’s degree from Tel Aviv University and his doctorate in composition from Juilliard, where he studied with John Corigliano. He now lives in the U.S. and teaches at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In addition to composing and teaching, Dorman is also a conductor, in which capacity he has been music director of the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra since 2013. In 2001, at the age of 25, Dorman became the youngest composer to win Israel’s Prime Minister’s Award for his Ellef Symphony. He then went on to earn awards from ASCAP, ACUM and the Asian Composers League.

Dorman’s music is performed by the world’s leading musicians and orchestras, which include the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Munich Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic and the Taiwan Philharmonic. His highly varied catalogue is rapidly approaching one hundred works in nearly every genre and formation. His fifth and most recent piano sonata was commissioned by the Arthur Rubinstein International Music Society in 2016. His first opera, Wahnfried, premiered in Karlsruhe in 2017, was nominated a finalist for the 2018 International Opera Awards. The opera depicts the relationships between the English scientist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Wagner family and the young Adolf Hitler. Dorman’s orchestral works include those with such intriguing titles as Variations Without a Theme, Astrolatry, Siklòn (the Haitian Creole word for cyclone) and Lost Souls. Then there is a whole host of concertos and solo works for such instruments as mandolin, piccolo, saxophone and percussion, in addition to those for piano, cello and violin (including one for violin and rock band).

Dorman’s Nigunim (Third Violin Sonata) was premiered in New York in 2011 by Gil and Orli Shaham, for whom it was written. In 2014, the composer orchestrated the piano part, and in 2017 heavily revised it, in which form Nigunim won the 2018 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music. Tonight’s performance marks the first for this revision. “I tried to bring more of the folk elements and rhythmic variety to the fore through orchestral colours,” says Dorman, “often by using instruments in unusual ranges and with unorthodox performance techniques. I think the biggest challenge was to preserve the role of the original piano part without overwhelming the violin and maintaining a balance that makes the piece sound like a genuine concerto.”

Nigunim (plural of nigun, also spelled niggun) are a type of Jewish religious song, largely improvisatory in nature, and often incorporating repetitive sounds such as “bam-bam-bam” or “doi-doi-doi.” In tone they may be mournful and devotional, or joyous and triumphant. Dr. James Loeffler, on the web site myjewishlearning.com, notes that nigunim are “often described as mystical musical prayers or a spiritual language beyond words. They are songs formed of multiple melodic phrases, typically sung without instrumental accompaniment and without words,” and are “performed in a distinctive expressive vocal style with dramatic inflections similar to cantorial music referred to by the Yiddish words krekhts (literally moan, sigh, or sob) and kneytsh (pinch).

Dorman writes that in preparing to compose Nigunim, “I decided to explore the music of various Jewish traditions from different parts of the world and how they relate to larger local musical traditions. To my surprise, I found that there are some common musical elements to North African Jewish cantillations, Central Asian Jewish wedding songs, Klezmer music and Ashkenazy prayers. Though I did not use any existing Jewish melodies for Nigunim, the main modes and melodic gestures of the piece are drawn from these common elements. Moreover, different sections of the piece draw upon local non-Jewish musical traditions of each of these regions. For example, the second movement uses principles found in Georgian folk rhythms and harmonies and the fourth is inspired by Macedonian dances.”

2016: Brian Current
The Seven Heavenly Halls
Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music

“The voice of an original composer with something important to say could be clearly heard” “The composer lives in Toronto; he is worth watching, even from afar” – Alan Rich, LA Weekly

In 2017, Brian Current’s new opera Missing premiered in Vancouver. His first opera, Airline Icarus received the Premio Fedora in 2011 for Best New Chamber Opera, and a 2015 Juno Award for its recording on Naxos. It was also invited to Opera America’s New Works Showcase and to the Fort Worth Opera Frontiers Festival.

Current studied composition at McGill University and UC Berkeley (PhD, 2002). His music, lauded and broadcast in over 35 countries, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music (USA) and a Selected Work (composers under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Additional prizes and awards have come from the Fromm Music Foundation of Harvard University, the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, among others.

Visit: www.briancurrent.com

Programme notes

Composer Brian Current on The Seven Heavenly Halls:

“I became interested in the Zohar (the Book of Enlightenment) while researching texts for The River of Light, a large-scale multi-movement oratorio for choir, orchestra and soloists. The name of the cycle comes from Dante’s Paradiso, where the Pilgrim enters the glowing core of heaven and declares: “And I saw a light in the form of a river, radiant as gold, between banks painted with wondrous springs.” My frequent collaborator and librettist Anton Piatigorsky introduced me to the Zohar (attributed to Rabbi Moses de Leon (1250-1305), which he described as the most central book in the Kabbalah and the most mysterious of Jewish mystical texts. I immediately heard turbulent and gestural music full of orchestral colours.

“Even more inspiring and brimming with musical possibilities was the Zohar’s reference to The Seven Heavenly Halls, a series of ecstatic stages where each vision is marked by a different colour. After passing through each of the coloured halls a mystical traveller will, much like Dante’s Pilgrim, enter a seventh and “colourless” state: “not white, not black, not red, not green, no colour at all. When a band spanned, it yielded radiant colours.” I envisioned a piece made up of seven ecstatic stages represented by different musical colours and textures. With the addition of three introductory movements, the piece is divided into ten sections, to be performed with little or no pause between them.

“Throughout, the tenor soloist acts as both our guide through The Heavenly Halls and as our medium into the texts of the Zohar. In calmer moments he sings in a style resembling cantillation, using scales based on the traditional Ahavah Rabbah, Magein Avot and Adonai Malach modes. The chorus, on the other hand, is envisioned as myriad voices within the texture of the orchestra so that the music is layered with the sounds of the traditional Sefirot: keter, binah, chochmah, da’at, chesed, gevurah, tiferet, hod, netzach, yesod and malchut.

“The Seven Heavenly Halls forms Part I of The River of Light, a large-scale multi-movement cycle for choir, orchestra and soloists. Made up of seven separate pieces, The River of Light is about transcendence and is based on the texts of several traditions (Hindu, Christian, Jewish, First Nations Canadian, Sufi, Maori and Chinese) that describe mystical journeys towards an exalted state.

“Many thanks to Anton Piatigorksy for adapting the texts, to Yehoshua Rosenthal in Jerusalem for translating them and to the scholars Daniel Matt (UC Berkeley), Nathan Wolski (Monash University) and Arthur Haberman (York University) for help interpreting them.”

2016: Wlad Marhulets
Klezmer Clarinet Concerto
Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music

The music of Wlad Marhulets has been performed far and wide by world-class musical organizations, such as Lyric Opera of Chicago, Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Princeton Symphony, Orchestre National de Lyon, the Sinfonietta Cracovia, the Lithuanian choir Jauna Muzika, Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra and others.

He has won the Susan W. Rose Fund Grant, the Peter D. Faith Prize, and five ASCAP Awards, including the prestigious Leonard Bernstein Award. A full scholarship student during his tenure at the Juilliard School, Wlad studied composition exclusively with Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winner John Corigliano.

Wlad’s klezmer opera The Property was premiered with Lyric Opera of Chicago to great success. It has received rave reviews, such as: “Marhulets miraculously combines the elements of klezmer, the “secular” side of Jewish music, with the underpinnings of contemporary opera. His use of leitmotif is masterful, and his sense of vocal line, sublime.” (New City Stage.)

An active film composers, Wlad has worked on such films as Ambition, directed by Bob Shaye, Hitman: Agent 47, starring Rupert Friend and Zachary Quinto, Ruby Strangelove Young Witch, directed by Evgeny Ruman, The Giver, starring Meryl Streep, November Man, starring Pierce Brosnan, Orchestra of Exiles, directed by Oscar nominee Josh Aronson, Sabotage, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others. At present, Wlad is working on the score for DARQ, one of the most anticipated horror video games, which will be released in early 2019.

Visit: wladmarhulets.com

Programme Notes

Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet

“Klezmer music came crashing into my life when, as a sixteen-year-old living in Gdansk, Poland, my brother Damian brought home a CD by a band called Klezmer Madness, featuring the clarinetist David Krakauer. This was music that was so boldly Jewish, so full of wild energy that a kind of madness enveloped my senses as I listened to it… I decided to become a musician on the spot.”

So began composer Wlad Marhulets’ lifelong fascination with the folk music of his Jewish heritage, along with his determination to bring that music to light on a wider stage. Five years later, while he was studying in New York, Marhulets and Krakauer finally met. The result was the Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet, first performed in 2009 by Krakauer and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under conductor Andrew Litton. A composite style of music derived from the Ashkenazi Jewish traditions of eastern Europe, transmission of klezmer (kli – zemer: literally, vessel of music) was largely unwritten, tending to adapt and mould to local contexts as required. The music of the klezmorim was usually celebratory in function, often heard at weddings and other special occasions. Instrumentation was rarely fixed. In keeping with its flexible tradition, the 20th century American klezmer revival assimilated elements of jazz, funk and even hiphop. Marhulets follows suite, infusing his polystylistic work with contemporary genres, while further adapting the form for the symphonic medium.

The energetic first movement immediately highlights the clarinet’s virtuosic potential through multiple trills and a specialized style of “bent” notes meant to evoke the human voice. A perpetually mobile orchestral accompaniment maintains rhythmic stability, while the clarinet persistently emphasizes offbeats and an electric bass guitar hints at elements of funk. The second movement begins with a solo clarinet cadenza. Discreet strings create a haunting echo effect and lead to the hazy entrance of the full orchestra in this sepia-hued nigun-style lament. A second solo cadenza plunges without pause into the third movement, in which a singular obsessive motive is repeated, transformed and recycled to its exhaustive and virtuosic conclusion, bringing the concerto to a brisk close.

Wlad Marhulets’ work Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet is the winner of the inaugural Azrieli Prize in Jewish Music, announced in June, 2016.