Yotam Haber

Laureate – Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music 2020

His music hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians “2014 Faces To Watch,” and chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440, Yotam Haber was born in Holland and grew up in Israel, Nigeria and Milwaukee. He is a laureate of the 2020 Azrieli Music Prizes and a recipient of a 2017 Koussevitzky Commission for the Library of Congress, a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, a 2013 NYFA award, the 2007 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has received grants and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the MAP Fund, New Music USA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation, Yaddo, Bogliasco, MacDowell Colony, the Hermitage, ASCAP, the Copland House, Aspen Music Festival and Tanglewood.

In 2015, Haber’s first monographic album of chamber music, Torus, was hailed by New York’s WQXR as “a snapshot of a soul in flux – moving from life to the afterlife, from Israel to New Orleans – a composer looking for a sound and finding something powerful along the way.”

Recent commissions include works for Argento New Music Project, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Kronos Quartet and Carnegie Hall, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor; an evening-length oratorio for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, CalARTS@REDCAT/ Disney Hall (Los Angeles); New York-based Contemporaneous, Gabriel Kahane and Alarm Will Sound; the 2015 New York Philharmonic CONTACT! Series; the Venice Biennale; Bang on a Can Summer Festival; Neuvocalsolisten Stuttgart and ensemble l’arsenale; FLUX Quartet, JACK Quartet, Cantori New York, the Tel Aviv-based Meitar Ensemble, and the Berlin-based Quartet New Generation.

Recent and upcoming projects of note include New Water Music, an interactive work (2017) for the Louisiana Philharmonic and hundreds of community musicians performed from boats and barges along the waterways of New Orleans; and his first opera, The Lime Works, with librettist Royce Vavrek based on the work of Thomas Bernhard.

Haber is Associate Professor of Composition at UMKC Conservatory and Artistic Director Emeritus of MATA, the non-profit organization founded by Philip Glass that has, since 1996, been dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works by young composers from around the world. His music is published by RAI Trade.

www.yotamhaber.com

Programme notes

Estro Poetico-armonico III for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra

I. The Meal (Eliahu) | Tzur Mishelo Achalnu
II. Wanted to Elaborate… (Shabtai) | Ahot Ktanah
III. Night Prayer (Eliahu) | Havdallah
IV. Abraham Becomes Human (Bernstein) | Chad Gadya
V. Song of the Righteous (Bar-Kohav) | Kol Biru’ei

Born in Leiden, Netherlands October 27, 1976; now living in Kansas City, Missouri

Yotam Haber was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Israel, Nigeria and Milwaukee. His teachers have included Eugene O’Brian, Claude Baker, Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra at Indiana University and Cornell University. His eclectic catalogue of works includes I AM for chorus and string quartet, Death in Venice for solo trumpet and Knife in the Water for bass clarinet, percussion and electronics. Upcoming projects include two works for chamber ensemble, They Say You Are My Disaster and Bloodsnow. Haber is Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance.

From 2010-2014, Haber served as Artistic Director of MATA, the non-profit organization dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works by young composers from around the world. He now holds the title of Artistic Director Emeritus of that organization. Haber’s many prizes include a 2017 Koussevitzky Commission, a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, the 2007 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Most recently, Haber is the recipient the 2020 Azrieli Jewish Commission. In awarding the commission, the jury declared Haber’s music to be “fascinating, beautiful, clever and moving. The application of his craft and skill to his compositions demonstrates that he has all the makings of a great composer.”

The work Haber composed for the Azrieli Foundation, a song cycle for mezzo and chamber orchestra titled Estro Poetico-armonico III, is third in a series that he began in 2012. For that first work, he used the fifty Psalm settings by the Baroque composer Benedetto Marcello, who transcribed and arranged what he heard in Venetian synagogues and “passed it through yet one more filter, one more “broken telephone game,’” as Haber describes it. “Visualize an oil painting left out in the rain before it has had a chance to dry, colors bleeding. I have turned this image into its musical counterpart.” This first work in the series was premiered at the MATA Festival in Brooklyn (New York) in 2012. Three years later, Estro Poetico-armonico II for voice and five instruments was presented at the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! Festival and at the Venice Biennale. Music aficionados will note the similarity in title to Vivaldi’s Estro armonico, a magnificent set of twelve concertos whose title might be translated as something like “harmonic whim” or “musical fancy.” It is worth noting that Haber has also, in a similar vein, borrowed the concept of another famous Baroque composer’s masterpiece, Handel’s Water Music, for an interactive work written in 2017 for the Louisiana Philharmonic, to be performed from boats and barges along the waterways of New Orleans.

In Estro Poetico-armonico III, Haber also continues to explore the music of Rome’s Jewish community as discovered through the archival recordings of ethnomusicologist Leo Levi. He employs these recordings of traditional cantillation and liturgical texts in conjunction with – or in opposition to – texts by four modern Israeli poets (Ory Bernstein, Eli Eliahu, Israel Bar Kohav and Aharon Shabtai) that reflect upon aspects of modern Israeli life while also grappling with its history. As in his two previous Estro Poetico-armonico compositions, Haber’s new work continues Marcello’s ‘broken telephone game’ of hearing and re-hearing, remembering and misremembering, informing and misinforming. As a composer of Israeli background, Haber has spent years thinking about how he should look back at his past while looking forward at his future. Working in the time of pandemic has made him look deeply inwards, working in a way he has not done for as long as he can remember.

About the Leo Levi recordings that Haber chose for each movement*:

I. Tzur mishelo achalnu (“Rock of Sustenance”) is sung by Angelina Rocca Meghnagi, Rome, 1956, one of the very few women that appear in Levi’s recordings. This melody is probably derived from a popular style of the 18th century.

II. Ahot Ktanah is sung by Dario Israel, Trieste, 1956. A poem by Avraham ben Yitzhak Hazan Gerondi (13th century) for the evening of Rosh Hashanah in the Sephardic tradition of Trieste. The text, based on the Song of Songs, refers to Israel like a “little sister” (Ahot Ktanah), and calls for the liberation of the Jewish people from the suffering of years past.

III. Havdallah sung by Cesare Tagliacozzo, Rome, 1954. Benedictions and verses of messianic hope recited to signal the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the new week, in the Italian tradition of Rome.

IV. Chad Gadya sung by Fernando Procaccia, Genova, 1954. Many Italian-Jewish chants feature a strong regional component in their use of dialect and in the pronounciation of Italian and Hebrew words that reflect the local accents. In this Florentine version of the famous cumulative song of springtime, Chad Gadya (“one young goat”), each verse of the original Aramaic narration is followed by a translation to a Hebrew/Italian mix.

V. Kol Biru’ei sung by Paolo Nissim, Trieste, 1956. An acrostic poem describing “all the creatures” while singing and praising the unity of god. It is recited daily in the morning prayer in the Italian tradition. This melody is sung only during Rosh Hashanah in the Italian tradition of Padua. *Text adapted from notes by Francesco Spagnolo. All recordings used with permission from Dr. Edwin Seroussi and the Jewish Music Research Centre at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

*Text adapted from notes by Francesco Spagnolo.

All recordings used with permission from Dr. Edwin Seroussi and the Jewish Music Research Centre at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.