United Kingdom Azrieli Music Prizes – Iman Habibi, Aharon Harlap and Rita Ueda: Sharon Azrieli (soprano), Jessika Kenney (vocalist), Naomi Sato (sho), Zhongxi Wu (suona and sheng), Pouyan Biglar (setar), Georgia Mann (presenter), Philharmonia Orchestra / Steven Mercurio (conductor). Cadogan Hall, London, 15.10.2023. (TM)
Iman Habibi – Shāhīn-nāmeh
Aharon Harlap – Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord
Rita Ueda – Birds Calling… From the Canada in You
Launched a little less than a decade ago, the Azrieli Music Prizes (AMP) have already grown to become Canada’s largest competition devoted to music composition. The biennial initiative has expanded to embrace an international scope and last weekend made its London debut at Cadogan Hall with a programme of all three prize-winning works from the 2022 rounds. Steven Mercurio, a member of the AMP Jewish Music jury, led the Philharmonia Orchestra and guest soloists.
The AMP began in 2014 with a focus on Jewish musical identity and later expanded to include a prize for a work that engages with ‘the complexities of composing Canadian concert music’. A fourth category, the Azrieli Commission for International Music, was introduced for the competition cycle currently in progress. The four prize-winning composers for 2024, selected by three distinct juries (for ‘Jewish music’, ‘Canadian music’ and ‘International music’), will be announced on 2 November. The prizes are just one undertaking by the Azrieli Foundation, the largest public foundation in Canada. Established in 1989 by David Azrieli, the foundation focuses on the fields of medical and scientific research and education as well as arts and culture.
The conceptual and stylistic diversity of the three works presented at the London debut concert underscored the vision of intercultural understanding that inspired Sharon Azrieli, a daughter of the late David Azrieli, to found the AMP in the first place. During a break in the programme, in which she also performed as a soprano soloist, the Montréal-based Azrieli spoke with presenter Georgia Mann about her desire to fill a void with respect to the encouragement of contemporary composition as an impetus behind launching the AMP.
The three featured compositions were initially unveiled a year ago at a concert in Montréal (on 20 October 2022), with Alexandre Bloch leading the Orchestre Métropolitain; the world premiere recording of these works was just released on Analekta, marking the fourth volume in the ‘New Jewish Music’ series, AMP’s ongoing collaboration with that label to document the prize-winning compositions. All of these steps — the commission award ($50,000 CAD), recording and live international performances — add up to a total award valued at more than $200,000 CAD per composer. It should be noted that ‘composers of all nationalities, faiths, backgrounds, genders, ages and levels of experience’ are eligible to participate in the competition.
The concert at Cadogan Hall began with Shāhīn-nāmeh by Iman Habibi, an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist born in Tehran in 1985 who immigrated to Canada in 2003. Habibi chose the fourteenth-century Judeo-Persian poet Shāhin-i Shirāzi’s retelling of and commentary on the biblical story of Esther and her thwarting of Haman’s planned genocide of the Jews in Persian thanks to her intervention with the Persian King Xerxes I. The composer explained that Shāhin’s poetry is mostly unknown to contemporary Iranians, adding that his hope is not only to bring attention to a neglected poet but also to show ‘the close affinity that has existed historically between Persians and Jews, dating back to … the 6th century B.C.’.
It is easy to see why the premise behind Habibi’s five-part song cycle fascinated the AMP jurors, who selected it as the 2022 winner of the commission for Jewish music. But the composition itself turned out to be just as intriguing. Shāhīn-nāmeh successfully juxtaposes the sonority of a Western orchestra with Persian classical and folk idioms — meaning, in this case, that improvisation and micro-intervals outside the Western tonal system played an important role in the contributions by the two soloists.
Filling in at the last minute for the Iranian singer Sara Hamidi, Jessika Kenney accomplished an outstanding feat in conveying the emotional layers behind her florid, gracefully traced melismas, singing in the ancient Persian. She was complemented by the London-based instrumentalist Pouyan Bigler, a polymathic Iranian musician who enhanced the intimacy of key moments with his refined playing on setar (Persian lute). The musical dramaturgy includes a lengthy solo interlude bridging the way to the cycle’s climax.
The use of amplification initially seemed as if it would jar with the acoustic orchestral soundscape, but Mercurio negotiated a fine balance that blended the various sound worlds intriguingly. Habibi’s alluring score likewise amalgamated its highly varied sources persuasively, mixing touches of Stravinskian neoclassicism and anticipatory, folk-like drones serving the overall sense of a ceremonial and even bardic performance instead of a linear narrative.
Aharon Harlap, who was born in Canada in 1941, has long since been a resident to Israel and had to cancel his plan to attend at the last minute. This was a sober reminder of the recent terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, which had taken place only a week before the concert. Winner of the AMP category for Jewish music (intended for ‘the best new undiscovered work of Jewish music’), Harlap’s Out of the Depths Have I Cried onto Thee, O Lord dates from 2008. Sharon Azrieli, who has also pursued a professional career as a soprano and cantor, sang the solo part of this cycle of Psalm settings with passion and charisma.
Singing in the original Hebrew, Azrieli encompassed the spectrum from anxiety and despair to jubilant hope with which Harlap frames his work. Her stage presence and vocal heft worked in harmony to deliver these settings as miniature music dramas. At the same time, the cycle’s unifying elements came across clearly, allowing the darkness of the opening dirge to reach a Mahler-inspired breakthrough and resolution in the final song. His conservative, Neo-romantic idiom evoked several points of reference with familiar repertoire yet offered a unique payoff of solace and comfort in (perhaps not uniquely) troubled times.
Those in search of musical novelty found much to delight in when it came to the final work of the programme, which seemed to be the audience’s favourite. Rita Ueda, who was born in Japan but moved with her artistically inclined family to Vancouver, Canada, in the early 1970s and remains based there, won the AMP commission for Canadian music for her work Birds Calling from Canada … from the Canada in You.
A stunning variation on the concerto format, Birds Calling is written for a pair of soloists playing traditional Chinese and Japanese instruments in counterpoint with a modern orchestra and combines Asian and Western musical systems. Ueda describes herself as pursuing ‘intercultural music – a musical genre that incorporates musicians from a variety of cultures to create a new transcultural identity without the loss of each member’s origins’.
Be that as it may, Ueda’s work is a brilliantly imaginative sonic pageant rolled up with an environmental drama. The common ground here is the presence of some 450 species of Canadian birds whose calls are said to be incorporated into the score. Ueda rivals Messiaen in her dazzling interweave of bird call rhythms and gestures, wondrously evoked through a vast assortment of extended techniques and special effects.
Birds Calling is also a notably spatial composition that needs to be experienced in live performance to exert its full effect. The Philharmonia’s winds and brass were situated in a ring around Cadogan Hall’s balcony level and amid the audience, with the strings and percussion onstage – Mercurio all the while coordinating the orchestra and soloists with the unflagging attention of an air traffic controller at a busy international airport.
Ueda also turns the concerto into a ritualistic drama. The two soloists – Naomi Sato and Zhongxi Wu – proceeded down the aisles to join the players onstage amid a rioting texture of birdcalls produced in surround-sound. The ‘characters’ represented by their instruments seemed to illustrate archetypal polarities – yin and yang, heaven and earth – as Zhongxi Wu wielded the brash, perky, raucous sounds of his double-reed suona with a Papageno-like friskiness. Naomi Sato, who played the Japanese bamboo-pipe shō, said by the composer to represent the ancient Phoenix and ‘the space between heaven and earth’, by contrast streamed a shimmering fog of sonorities that Ueda later sonically likened to an orchestra tuning. Zhongxi Wu at one point engaged in a Peking Opera-like duet/duo with an aggressive cymbalist and later retreated to the balcony to join the wind players.
Birds Calling builds to an awe-inspiring near-chaos at its centre – but a sense of order undergirds the splendid diversity of birdcalls. The work is especially moving in the final section, in which the ensemble generates a vast, rolling lullaby where everything seems to have its place, until a snare drum’s imitation of a gunshot brings it all to a deadening halt.
Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator and translator whose work appears in The New York Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival, he also writes program notes for the Ojai Festival in California.