Chaya Czernowin (*1957 in Haifa, Israel) composes operas, orchestral and chamber works with and without electronics, which are performed worldwide. She was Composer in Residence at the 2005/06 Salzburg Festival and at the Lucerne Festival 2013. She is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University and has been Professor of Composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the University of California San Diego Czernowin works imaginatively and analytically with metaphors as a means of reaching a sound world which is unfamiliar and is never taken for granted attempting to give a voice to what is internally hidden from one’s view.

Her major works include the opera Pnima, the orchestral piece Maim, HIDDEN for quartet and electronics, the operas Infinite Now and Heart Chamber (2018/19), The Fabrication of Light (2019/20), and Atara (2021).

Czernowin’s work has been awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Fromm and Kranichsteiner Music Prizes of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, among others. Her operas Pnima (2000) and Infinite Now (2017) were voted among the best world premieres of the year in the international critics’ poll of Opernwelt.  Her CD the quiet was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik.  Her work is published by Schott, she is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Akademie der Schönen Künste Munich, and is on the board of the European Academy of Music Theater.

chayaczernowin.com

The seven singers see themselves as explorers and discoverers who are constantly searching for new forms of vocal expression in exchange with composers. One focus is the work with artists who virtuously exploit the possibilities of digital media, with a desire for networking, playing with genres, dissolving space, perspectives and functions. The ensemble’s projects are characterised by idiosyncratic interdisciplinary formats between music theatre, performance, installation and concert staging. With more than 30 premieres a year, the ensemble’s work is regarded worldwide as leading and unique in the field of contemporary vocal music. The ensemble’s partners are always top-class specialist ensembles and orchestras, international opera houses, the independent theatre scene, electronic studios and numerous organisers of festivals and concert series of new music all over the world.

Against this background, the Neue Vocalsolisten have formed the genre of vocal chamber music theater. The singers also regularly collaborate with artists from non-European musical cultures and genres. In VOICE AFFAIRS, the Neue Vocalsolisten initiate artistic border crossings in which contemporary music is infected by the diversity of Lebanon’s experimental music scenes.

In its new series »Magical Spaces«, the ensemble, together with three young web designers, explores future performance formats between analog and digital perception, exploring all the possibilities of digital media.