Contact
Isabella Vasilottaiv@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-240
Elke Moltrechtem@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-227
Estefanía Montes Menéndezes@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-228
General Management
From life on the front line to the intimacies of love: Chaya Czernowin’s new opera Heart Chamber presents a huge tonal shift from the subject matter of her last project for the stage.
Chaya Czernowin talks about her artistic path and her cello concerto.
“One of the most important living composers. Her oeuvre is diverse and large, her musical language radical and original. Her four operas are like shock waves for the genre. With her compositions, she makes existential themes a tangible experience for the audience. Like no other, she manages to constantly evolve, to search for new things and at the same time to keep a common thread running through all her works." Gema Deutscher Musikautor*innenpreis, the Jury about Chaya Czernowin, 24/03/2022
Chaya Czernowin’s operas and orchestral or chamber works, with and without electronics, have been performed worldwide. She was composer in residence in Salzburg festival 2005/6, Lucerne Festival 2013, and Huddersfield festival in 2021. She was a professor of composition at the University of California at San Diego, and the first woman to be a composition professor at both the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria, and at Harvard University, where she has been Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music since 2009.
Chaya Czernowin works imaginatively and analytically to create an evolving sonic experience, which at its base is multisensory, as it folds the tactile and visual into sound. This is a speculative world where every piece attempts to open a yet unfamiliar field of existence where visceral and emotional experience can emanate. Nothing is taken for granted and risk serves as an opportunity for unpredictable growth and vitality.
Main compositions include the orchestral piece Maim; HIDDEN for quartet and electronics; The Wintersongs cycle I- V; the operas Pnima, Infinite Now, and Heart Chamber, and most recently The fabrication of light as well as Atara, Immaterial, and Seltene Erde.
Chaya Czernowin’s work has been awarded the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, the GEMA Musikautor*innen Preis, fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fromm Foundation, and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at Darmstadt Ferienkurse, among many others. Both operas Pnima (in 2000) and Infinite Now (in 2017) were chosen as the best premieres of the year in the international critics’ survey of Opernwelt. Her album the quiet won the German Record Critics' Prize. Her work is published by Schott, and she is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Akademie der Schönen Künste Munich, and is on the board of the European Academy of Music Theatre.
More at chayaczernowin.com
2022/23 season
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions, or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
A list of all works by Chaya Czernowin can be found on the Schott Music website.
"Chaya Czernowin is one of the most important living composers. Her oeuvre is diverse and large, her musical language radical and original. Her four operas are like shock waves for the genre. With her compositions, she makes existential themes a tangible experience for the audience. Like no other, she manages to constantly evolve, to search for new things and at the same time to keep a common thread running through all her works."
Deutscher Musikautor*innenpreis, the Jury about Chaya Czernowin, 24/03/2022
"Few living composers satisfy Goethe’s belief that “music is liquid architecture” more than Czernowin."
The Guardian, Hugh Morris, 22/11/2021
"...she has been nourishing orchestras and singers for several decades with a language of her own, in which she attempts the impossible combination of the heightened sensitiveness of the patient and the analytical precision of the surgeon. (... ) As an artist does, she integrates the event (George Floyd's death), his inhalation, his forced breathing, the words, the suffering of the man -and of the woman- into her music, a 55-minute monument dedicated to the last breath of Floyd the oppressed black man with a compressed chest, to the breath that was choked off (yes) and to this pandemic that suddenly turned everything upside down but left everything (things, issues, deaths) unchanged -or nearly so- because our habits are so deep, so ingrained, so easy- and the words are those of the choristers, of their world impacted by the epidemic."
Crescendo Magazine, Bernard Vincken, 26/10/2021
"Chaya Czernowin is a major, distinctive voice in new music on both sides of the Atlantic."
The Guardian, Andrew Clements, 18/03/2021
“The strength of 'Heart Chamber' is Chaya Czernowin's fabulously refined, precisely noted score, dictated by a sensitive musical imagination, which the ramifications in the growth and decay of nature have chosen for their roaring pandemonium of sounds and noises. [...] It conjures to mind Luigi Nono's sound mysticism, György Ligeti's 'Atmosphères' cluster or Helmut Lachenmann's disturbing 'Little Match-Girl' opera. The composer triumphs, after ninety non-stop minutes, receiving a standing ovation.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wolfgang Schreiber, 17/11/2019
“[…] a spatial experience that takes your breath away. Instruments sound from places where there can never be instruments; voices come from directions where no singer has ever been. Who sings what, and where the line between instrumental and vocal sound runs is impossible to predict. The sonic experience of this evening is an event unto itself.”
Die Deutsche Bühne, Detlef Brandenburg, 16/11/2019
“With her overtone-rich music, full of microtones and a sense for the hidden, Chaya Czernowin creates a unique world – her own world, her own musical language, characterised by rhythms which branch out, and in which the composer explores stillness and its nuances of colour and sound. This is a music which creates inner peace.”
BR Klassik, Kristin Amme, 18/12/2017 on the CD Hidden
“Czernowin’s score includes eruptions of orchestral, vocal, and electronic pandemonium that evoke with unnerving immediacy the chaos of battle and its aftermath. She has achieved, however, something more than a sombre memorial to death and destruction.”
The New Yorker, Alex Ross, 15/05/2017 on the world premiere of Infinite Now at Opera Vlaanderen, Ghent
“Czernowin’s opera dwells. It inhabits its big box of time-space, all the way to its edges. It penetrates. It overwhelms. [...] Such is Czernowin’s authority as a composer. I cannot think of anyone else who could have written this opera: she is an artist at the height of her powers.”
The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 20/04/2017 on Infinite Now
Chaya Czernowin - Heart Chamber [Official Trailer]
Infinite Now: Komponistin Chaya Czernowin im Portrait (englisch)
Produktionseinblick in »Infinite Now« von Chaya Czernowin
Infinite Now, de Chaya Czernowin
Chaya Czernowin: A Strange Bridge Toward Engagement
Chaya Czernowin — Knights of the Strange (tutti) [w/ score]
Chaya Czernowin — Ayre: Towed through plumes, thicket, asphalt, sawdust... [w/ score]
Chaya Czernowin — Sahaf [w/ score]
Chaya Czernowin — String Quartet [w/ score]
Inbal Hever, Mezzosopran, JACK Quartet;Wergo, 2017
ICE International Contemporary Ensemble;Kairos, 2017
Werke für OrchesterWergo 2016