Michael Zev Gordon: Open Fund for Music Creators
A New Album of Orchestral and Large Ensemble Works (NMC)
Michael Zev Gordon’s 2019 chamber music album, ‘In the Middle of Things’ (Resonus Classics), was described in the Sunday Times as displaying ‘a clockmaker’s craftsmanship [which] somehow coincides with romantic phantasmagoria’. The passionate and the contemplative come together in different ways in the three works in the new album too, now on a larger scale. Bohortha is a seven-movement work, commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2012, the title the name of a tiny Cornish hamlet, where the road ends and serenity reigns. The Violin Concerto (2017), another BBC Symphony Orchestra commission, is music of striving and singing, magnificently embodied in the playing of its soloist, Carolin Widmann. The third work, The Impermanence of Things (2010) for piano, large ensemble and electronics, was written for the London Sinfonietta and the pianist Huw Watkins, a long-term collaborator of Gordon’s. It too plays out a search for tranquility across its variously titled thirteen movements, culminating in ‘May his memory be a blessing’, a core Jewish sentiment at a time of mourning. The flavour of memory (and loss) remains a central source of inspiration, most recently in the final, tragic scene of Gordon’s 2022 chamber opera, Raising Icarus.