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The Azrieli Music Prizes
The Azrieli Foundation has supported innovative new music through the Azrieli Music Prizes since 2014. Prize recipients Iman Habibi, Aharon Harlap, and Rita Ueda, the 2022 Azrieli Music Prize Laureates, debuted their compositions in Montreal in October 2022 and in London in October 2023. The works’ U.S. premieres will be featured at a concert with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York on March 28, 2024.
We spoke with two of the composers as the U.S. debut approached.
Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music: Aharon Harlap
Canadian-born Israeli composer and conductor Aharon Harlap is a senior lecturer in conducting and heads the Opera Department at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. He is also music director and conductor of the Kfar Saba Chamber Choir and “Bel Canto” – the Israeli Male Choir. Among his many honors is a Life Achievement Award from ACUM (Composers’ and Authors Organization of Israel) for his decades-long contribution to music in Israel as a composer, conductor and teacher.
Harlap received the 2022 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music for Out of the Depths Have I Cried unto Thee, O Lord, a setting of five Psalms for soprano and orchestra.
Noting that the Psalms have been a source of solace and comfort to the Jewish people for ages, Harlap said that he had “chosen five [Psalms] that deal with the belief in God’s strength to overcome all adversity and to protect us in times of need.”
With all his plaudits, the composer doesn’t take for granted the acknowledgement his work has received during his career. Recognition by a preeminent organization like the Azrieli Foundation, he told us, gives him “a feeling of pride in knowing that all the hard work that goes into the creation of my music has not been in vain.” The fact that the Foundation is a Canadian-Jewish one, he said, adds to his pride in his Canadian-Jewish roots.
More generally, he told us that despite his long record of accomplishment, “to be recognized as a serious composer by such a preeminent organization…enables me to continue with more confidence than ever before.”
Out of the Depths
As a composer Harlap has often returned to Biblical and Judaic texts and themes, and indeed he has set Psalms before. He has referenced as creative inspirations “the many different psychological and philosophical situations related in the Psalms, such as depression, hope, deliverance, strife, love for the one God, etc.”
His new work, Out of the Depths Have I Cried unto Thee, O Lord, is a five-movement song cycle for soprano solo and piano or chamber orchestra. Critic Arthur Kaptainis of Ludwig Van Montréal praised its “lyricism of a Mahlerian stamp…married to a sure sense of the joys and sorrows inherent in the texts.” We asked the composer how the texts of particular Psalms come to life in the music.
The mood of the first two selections, Psalms 130 and 120, is one of despair, Harlap said. But the cycle follows these with Psalm 121, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.” Here the psalmist “feels security in God’s ways and knows that he will never be abandoned, and will be guarded throughout his days against all evil.” The piece opens and closes with a French horn motive that suggests the poet’s confidence in God accompanied by a “feeling of quiet reverence.”
After a celebratory “Halleluyah” (Psalm 121), the cycle ends with “Sing unto the Lord a new song” (Psalm 98). There the composer uses different motives from other parts of the cycle to show the passage “from despair to hope, to the final celebration of the highest praise for God’s works, and the complete and utter confidence in His power and strength” – thus producing the poet’s “new song.”
Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music: Rita Ueda
Vancouver-based Rita Ueda was the 2014 winner of the Penderecki International Composers’ Competition. She has premiered works with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to name a few.
For the Azrieli commission she created Birds Calling…from the Canada in You,” a double concerto for suona (Chinese double-reed horn), shō (Japanese mouth organ) and orchestra, incorporating birdsongs from Canadian species.
“Many of the iconic Canadian birds are not songbirds,” she said. “I decided to accept the diversity of our bird species to include birds that squawk, screech, hoot, drum and squeal, as well as those that sing and chirp.” The work blends musical traditions to celebrate Canadian multiculturalism and reflect on migration to and settlement of a “land already rich in history.”
We asked the composer to expand on this a bit. She told us that Birds Calling had evolved greatly from her initial intention, which was, she said, “to compose a celebratory Canadian bird song fanfare to celebrate the multicultural Canadian society that welcomed my immigrant family over 50 years ago.”
Two things made her rethink her approach. First, “I realized quickly that many beloved Canadian birds are not songbirds. Canada geese, arctic cranes, snowy owls, blue herons, pileated woodpeckers, Atlantic puffin, Anna’s hummingbirds (official bird of Vancouver, my home), etc. – we Canadians love them all, but their calls are not exactly what one would call ‘melodious.'”
So she decided “to set them in a soundscape composition with the musicians imitating their naturalistic sounds. The cacophony of birds you will hear from all around you in my music is what you would hear in the Canadian wilderness on any given morning.”
Having said that, she hopes listeners can identify calls from “two of Canada’s most iconic songbirds: the white-throated sparrow (whose song is Canada’s national anthem), and the call of the Canadian loon.”
The World Is Too Much With Us
Something else that had a major impact on the composition, Ueda said, was how complicated the year 2022 became for her as a Canadian.
“Many national news headlines that appeared throughout the year derailed my composing process,” she said. “Thousands of unmarked graves were discovered at former residential schools for Indigenous children. The truckers’ convoy protests in Ottawa spilled over into my neighborhood in Vancouver. The rise in gun violence, hate crimes, and general divisiveness in communities really shook my belief in Canadian society.”
And so “I felt that my Azrieli Prize in Canadian Music had to become an opportunity for people to engage in civil conversations about what being Canadian really means.”
Listeners can find these issues and circumstances reflected in the finished work. The first movement, for example, represents “how immigrants like my family find their way to Canada. As a seven-year-old immigrant from Japan, the orange CP Air jet looked to me like a magical bird that whisked my family to a new and better life. The shō and sheng (Japanese and Chinese mouth organs) will walk in the performance space like a set of wings flying across the ocean.
“The second movement features Zhongxi Wu on the suona (Chinese double reed horn) and the orchestra imitating the 450-plus species of Canadian wild birds. Wind players will be seated all around the balcony, creating a live orchestral 3D surround-sound bird soundscape.
I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain
“The third movement features Naomi Sato on the shō, exploring with the orchestra “the dangers of living in Canada. There will be snowstorms, freezing rain, floods, and wildfires. And the final movement features the Canadian loon against the backdrop of countless individual melodic voices that converge into one last statement of ‘O Canada.’ The final gunshot moment is a reminder to Canadians that the way of life we have now can be destroyed in an instant unless we protect it.”
None of this has shaken Ueda’s intense artistic engagement with nature. “Canada is a big country with many different communities and cultures living in vastly different geographic regions, but every Canadian has a relationship to nature, soundscape, and the environment,” she said. “Birds Calling as well as other works, such as the first spring blossoms awaken through the snow, forty tears of snowfall will not heal an ancient forest, and Ice Melting Trickling Gently, draw inspiration from nature to set in motion important conversations and discussions about our future.”
Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music: Iman Habibi
The Azrieli Foundation awards this commissioning prize biennially to the composer who proposes a response to the question “What Is Jewish Music?” that “displays the utmost artistry, technical mastery and professional expertise.”
2022 recipient Iman Habibi is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist. A founding member of the piano duo Piano Pinnacle, he was composer-in-residence of the 2023 Chelsea Music Festival. His compositions has been recorded by the Emily Carr String Quartet and the Vancouver Peace Choir, and he has twice won SOCAN Foundation Awards for original soundtracks.
Though we did not have a chance to catch up with Habibi before the NYC concert, we’ve heard his music before: Two of his songs were featured on Tyler Duncan and Erika Switzer’s lauded 2023 album A Left Coast.
Habibi’s piece, Shāhīn-nāmeh, is a song cycle for voice and orchestra based on based on the book of Esther and selected texts by 14th-century Judeo-Persian poet Shahin Shirazi. In this work the composer seeks to show the close affinity that has historically existed between Persians and Jews, dating back to the 6th century BCE.
The Orchestra of St. Luke’s and soloists will present the U.S. premieres of these works at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on March 28, 2024. All three works can also be heard on the Analekta release New Jewish Music, Vol. 4 – Azrieli Music Prizes.
