Seven Portraits

(miniatures)

Instrumentation: Piano Solo

Year of composition: 2020
Duration: 8 minutes
Dedication: Ofer Gadi Stolarov
Awards: Israel Conservatory of Music 2020 composition competition 2nd prize.
Score: Purchase score at IMI

Premiered by:
Oleg Yakerevich - 14.09.21 - Israel Conservatory of Music, award winners concert of the ICM composition competition

Additional Performances:

• Ofer Gadi Stolarov - Piano recital at Hannover Hochschule für Musik HMTMH

• Hagai Yodan - 17.08.2021 - Recordings at ICM, Tel Aviv

• Ofer Gadi Stolarov - 17.02.2022 Recordings at Tonstudio Tessmar

• Eden Lorenzen - 20.06.2022 - Piano recital at Beit David, Old Jaffa

• Dror Schweid - 06.06.2023 - Piano recital at Villa Seliegmann, Hannover

• Dror Schweid - 17.06.2023 - Piano recital at Villa Seliegmann, Hannover

Program note:
The piece that has started as a twelve-tone game, developed into a full cycle of seven miniatures for piano. Every portrait is dedicated to a canonical composer and flirts with his unique style.
The piece is composed in a twelve-tone technique, and uses a single twelve-tone row from the beginning to end.

Stylistically, every miniature speaks a different genre which is typical for the composer that it is named after, but the twelve-tone “DNA” properties unifies them into one coherent piece. I like to think about this composition as an abstraction of well-known ideas. The music expresses familiar aesthetics - canonical aesthetics through a radical “mismatching” grammar.

This special encounter with the beloved old ideas dressed in the twelve-tone disguise, reveals some of its hidden properties, it is funny, disgusting, beautiful, lively, and mostly challenge us with fascinating morphological questions about the true nature of the motif, the gesture, the phrase, the sentence, the part, the form and the cycle.