home • beneficiaries • musicians • workshops • events • press • about
us • our
flyer pdf
concert 02 • program
02 • concert 03 • program
03 • Iraq 2003 • concert
04 • program 04
concert
05 • program
05 • concert
06 • program
06 • concert
07 • program
07 • Iraq 2007
2010 Spring "Concert for Peace"
Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 7:30 PM
Merkin Concert Hall • 129 W. 67th Street • NYC
Tickets: $25, $60, $100; Students: $12 • 212-501-3330
Purchase online at www.kaufman-center.org
Music of Jewish & Arab Composers
Featuring
Borromeo String
Quartet
Members of Imani
Winds
Randall
Scarlata, baritone
And the World Premiere of Furia by Mohammed Fairouz
In the spring of 2010, Musicians For Harmony presented a concert of contrapuntal
dialogue between cultures using the forum of contemporary music in a program
featuring works by five of the foremost living composers. Composers
of Jewish and Arab origin came together to showcase the
diversities, individual richness and, above all, shared histories and common
ground of their respective heritages.
Halim El-Dabh, a revolutionary voice in Egyptian music, is heard through
his String Quartet: Metamorphoses and Fugue on Egyptian Folklore. The quartet,
written in the 1950s, explores Arab folk idioms, maqam (Arabic modes) and
western contrapuntal forms (fugue). Tobias Picker's Nova followed:
a chamber work by "our finest composer for the lyric stage" (Wall
Street Journal) written as a companion to Schubert's Trout Quintet. Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner's Tanz and Máissele, Yiddish for "Dance
and Little Story," ends the first half.
The second half of the program opened with the work of a composer who combines
his Persian/Jewish background with one of the most distinctive American voices
of our time: Richard Danielpour's Third String Quartet was written to commemorate
the Holocaust and uses the baritone voice as a vehicle together with the
strings.
The evening ended with the world premiere of a song cycle commissioned by
Musicians For Harmony from Mohammed Fairouz, one of the most sought after
composers of the young generation. Drawing on his Persian Gulf
and Palestinian origins, Fairouz seeks to confront issues of communication through
the rich heritage of music and languages from the Middle East. The
cycle incorporated Arabic, Hebrew and English poetic traditions.