Yotam Haber: Torus
Chamber music 2007-2014 Featuring Contemporaneous & the Mivos Quartet
Yotam Haber whose music, hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” was named by the Los Angeles Times as on of the five classical
musicians “2014 Faces to Watch, and chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440. His grants include a 2005 Guggenheim grant and the 2007 Rome Prize; he served as Artistic Director of MATA, the organization founded by Philip Glass. The works include Torus; From the Book of Maintenance and Sustenance, a viola and piano duet based on Italian Jewish chant; We Were All and One Leaving Brooklyn, two works that engage in very different ways with recent poetry; and Last Skin, for eight electric quarter-tone violins, that reworks material from We Were All.
On Leaving Brooklyn
Yotam Haber
Yotam Haber
Contemporaneous
Were Were All
Yotam Haber’s refreshingly original compositions combine daring sparseness
with striking, opaque orchestration. His new CD TORUS is spiky, often gentle,
and consistently hypnotic. At times reminiscent of Ligeti, Pärt, and plainchant,
the CD as a while can only be described as true Haber ,and his unwavering
confidence makes us feel right at home in his strange, exhilarating world
Missy Mazzoli, composer
The title track Torus feeds the elastic Mivos Quartet through filters to conjure the
frightening beauty of artist Richard Serra's massive metal sculptures.
The distorted strings spin around one another at extremes of volume and speed.
Hannis Brown WQXR
Last Skin Part B