with
Essential Voices USA
Judith Clurman, music director and conductor
Todd Palmer, clarinet
Kathryn Andersen, violin
Michael Dahlberg, cello
Stacey Shames, harp
Larry Hochman & Paul Schoenfield, piano

The evening will feature performances of new choral works, presented in workshop/concert format, followed by an interactive audience discussion with each composer and conductor Judith Clurman about their music and compositional technique. Compositions by Tony Award® Winner Larry Hochman; Cantor Bruce L. Ruben, Director of the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at HUC-JIR; and Paul Schoenfield, esteemed American composer and faculty member from the University of Michigan, will be performed.

The concert will feature the World Premiere of Larry Hochman’s Prayer, a reworking of Hochman’s Holocaust orchestral work, for piano and chamber musicians. Selections from the Larry Hochman/Judith Clurman/Brian Stokes Mitchell arrangement of Chanukah songs, Songs of Freedom: A Celebration of Chanukah, will also be featured. The World Premiere of Cantor Ruben’s Circle of Life, which includes settings of Baruch Haba, Adonai Maon, and Ivdu, in chamber orchestrations by Hochman, will follow. Two of Paul Schoenfield’s a cappella motets will be heard, along with his setting of Al Hanisim and a reworking of a selection from his oratorio Chanah, for chorus and four-hand piano will be sung.

Artists and repertoire subject to change.