The Azrieli Music Prizes: Championing new music in Canada

In 2014, soprano Sharon Azrieli founded the Azrieli Music Prizes under the aegis of the world-renowned Azrieli Foundation, an organisation created to realise the philanthropic dreams of her father, architect David J Azrieli. Now, 10 years on, the Prizes’ first decade was marked last month with a gala concert at Montréal's Maison Symphonique. The concert, featuring performances by the chorus and musicians of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM) under artistic director and chorusmaster Andrew Megill, included music by four winners: Josef Bardanashvili, winner of the Prize for Jewish Music; Yair Klartag, winner of the 2024 Commission for Jewish Music; Jordan Nobles, winner of the 2024 Commission for Canadian music, and Juan Trigos, winner of a new prize – the 2024 Commission for International Music.

Aiming high: Sharon Azrieli wants her prizes to have an impact, ‘generational change is my mission for the next 20 years' ©Tam Photography | Danylo Bobyk

The four prizes are valued at $200,000 CAD (£112,713) each, including a $50,000 (£28,178) cash award, and also offer further performances of the winning pieces – a boon to any contemporary composer – plus, vitally, a recording. As managing director of the Azrieli Foundation’s Music, Arts and Culture arm, Jason van Eyk points out that while the concert is vital, ‘a recording would be incredibly important in ensuring the works have longevity, and ensuring the works have international exposure’. This promising 360-degree approach has seen previous prizewinning works receive performances in London, Israel, Berlin and Poland. As Sharon Azrieli, the Prizes’ creator, pointed out to me: ‘the beauty of the prizes is that they are there to create peace’. And she is nothing if not ambitious. ‘Generational change is my mission for the next 20 years,’ she says, explaining how she aims to achieve this through the steadfast belief that ‘music will make you a great doctor, a great thinker, music is what will make you a great anything if you have it as part of your core curriculum’.

When Azrieli first considered the idea of the prizes, she began by looking at what was not already present on the Canadian landscape. Although there are indeed significant competitions for performers – the Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Banff International String Quartet Competition in Alberta and the Concours musical international de Montréal in Quebec, to name a few – there was nothing comparable for composers.

Juan Trigos’ Simetrias Prehispánicas was performed against a backdrop of projected images including the Aztec serpent/dragon deity Quetzalcoatl ©Tam Photography | Danylo Bobyk

For the Azrieli Prizes, there are four criteria for acceptance: artistic merit (about 50 per cent of the total), technical proficiency, thematic fit (competitors are asked to ‘critically engage’ with the questions ‘what is Jewish music?’ and ‘what does it mean to write music in Canada today?’) and finally, one that might be hoped a no-brainer, capacity to deliver to a deadline. Open to all nationalities and faiths, the competition is unusual in that there is no age limit. van Eyk explains the role this plays in the Prizes’ success: ‘For those in mid-career, it's interesting, it’s like a re-ignition. Sharon is very anti-ageist; composers can reach maturity at any age’.

Three panels of judges select the winners. This year’s juries included composers Tania León and Ana Sokolović and conductor Gerard Schwarz among their numbers. The Prizes’ 2024 focus is on choral works with instrumental ensemble, a combination which resulted in four nicely contrasted works. Josef Bardanashvili’s ritualistic Light to My Path for mixed choir, saxophone, percussion and piano, winner of the Prize for Jewish Music, was the only piece not receiving its world premiere (the OSM musicians and chorus instead presented its North American premiere). A ‘choral fantasy’ based on a selection from the Book of Psalms by the same name, it exposed a deep spirituality; the composer pointed out to me that ancient and modern approaches to God are similar, and essentially, approaches to self. Bardanashvili’s music is richly polystylistic – certainly there are hints of Baroque, Classical and Stravinsky, specifically Symphony of Psalms, plus the influence of throat-singing, a technique common to both Canada and Asia.

Josef Bardanashvili, winner of the Prize for Jewish Music with conductor Andrew Megill ©Tam Photography | Danylo Bobyk

With a text taken from Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Yair Klartag’s The Parable of the Palace (winner of the Commission for Jewish Music) uses an ancient language no longer spoken: Judeo-Arabic, historically widely used in Arabic countries like the Egypt of Maimonides. Both Maimonides and Klartag explore the liminal space between rationality and irrationality (what Klartag calls the ‘irrational swamp’). The tale uses a spatial metaphor: a King’s chamber that contains the unknowable, at the centre of concentric circles representing various levels of knowledge. Scored for choir and four double-basses, Klartag’s language is uncompromising: he is linked to names such as Rebecca Saunders, Brian Ferneyhough and, most closely, Georg Friedrich Haas. In all of Klartag’s music, including Parable, I hear an insatiable curiosity – ‘the most exciting moments are when you find beauty in unexpected places,’ he explains. Here, double basses in their chthonic aspect destabilise and the actual sound of the Judeo-Arabic language (initially related to the composer via a professor in Iraq) was a vital inspiration. Haunting and unforgettable, this 2024 Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music introduces a composer of vital importance with, surely, a great future. In performing it, the sheer control of the OSM Chorus was astonishing.

Juan Trigos’ half-hour cantata-oratorio Simetrias Prehispánicas (Pre-Hispanic Symmetries), the inaugural winner of the Arieli Commission for International Music, is a primal expression of Mexican-Aztec civilization before the Spanish colonisation. The libretto is by Trigos’ father, novelist-playwright Juan Trigos Senior, who uses the rarely-used language of Nahuatl. The choir is asked to express itself via not just singing but shouting, whispering or crying, against ever-shifting wind and percussion, the whole performed against a backdrop of projected images including the Aztec serpent/dragon deity Quetzalcoatl. Glances to Orff, Stravinsky’s Les noces and Ives might be detected, and it is an arresting piece, although perhaps a touch overlong. The use of amplified flute and trombone is a particularly fascinating choice by the composer who states simply: ‘together in the middle register they are beautiful’.Conductor Andrew Megill led the the chorus and musicians of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in masterful premieres of the prize-winning works ©Tam Photography | Danylo Bobyk

Finally, a moment of static beauty in Jordan Nobles’ kanata for SATB voices a cappella. Recently returned from a residency in a tallship in the High Arctic, his music calls to mind the vast spaces of the music of John Luther Adams (himself a long-time resident of Alaska). Nobles, winner of the Commission for Canadian Music, echoes Canada’s appreciation of – and respect for – its indigenous nations: originally inspired by a journey across Canada by train, Nobles rediscovered native place-names, and in kanata deconstructs these as phonemic material. At the end, choir members sing the name of places important to them individually, in ‘a warm, glowing mass of all the voices of Canada speaking their languages,’ as he puts it. The title, an Iroquoian word meaning ‘settlement’, is considered to hold the etymological origins of ‘Canada’. ‘I’m using the text like texture,’ Nobles says, ‘slowly morphing between one phoneme and another’. For Nobles, the sound of the words is more important than the words themselves. The final product is, simply, beautiful.

Conductor Andrew Megill, who tackled each new piece with the OSM’s chorus and musicians told me, ‘When a piece is brand new, it takes a certain kind of energy’. Taking on the challenge of four new works, with four such different compositional ‘voices’, the choir’s focus has to shift substantially between each piece. Demands on concentration and stamina are therefore vast, and the OSM Choir triumphed under his direction. But it is the music that will speak on and on – all four voices deserve our attention.