About the Program
Music and Migration is a collaborative program stemming from a deep friendship between the Aizuri Quartet and the Syrian-American clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh. All five of the artists have different personal relationships to and experiences of migration, as do their families. The music of this concert approaches the theme of migration in the broadest possible terms, as a physical journey and state of mind, and something that occurs both between and within countries.
Built around a new commission from the extraordinary composer and violinist Layale Chaker, this program includes three additional works (by Azmeh, Wang Lu and Michi Wiancko), wide-ranging in style and approach, commissioned by the Aizuri Quartet to respond to this theme. The music of the Armenian composer Komitas Vardapet and the American vocalist/composer/banjo and fiddle player Rhiannon Giddens expresses both the sorrow and resilience of peoples forcibly separated from their homelands and experiencing the horrors of genocide and slavery. Closing the program is the music of the Cuban-American saxophonist, clarinetist and composer Paquito D’Rivera, which beautifully straddles multiple cultures and musical traditions.
About the Artists
Aizuri Quartet
Praised by The Washington Post for “astounding” and “captivating” performances that draw from its notable “meld of intellect, technique and emotions,” the Aizuri Quartet was named the recipient of the 2022 Cleveland Quartet Award by Chamber Music America, and was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2018 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition.
The Quartet’s debut album, Blueprinting, was released by New Amsterdam Records to critical acclaim (“In a word, stunning”), nominated for a 2019 GRAMMY Award and named one of NPR Music’s Best Classical Albums of 2018. Aizuri’s follow-up album, Earthdrawn Skies, was released in 2023 and praised by NPR as an album that “convincingly connects the dots in wildly diverse music stretching over eight centuries…arousing solemn contemplation, cosmic curiosity, folksy delight and introspective scrutiny.”
The Aizuri believes in an integrative approach to music-making, in which teaching, performing, writing, arranging, curation, and role in the community are all connected. Formed in 2012 and combining four distinctive musical personalities into a powerful collective, the Aizuri Quartet draws its name from “aizuri-e,” a style of predominantly blue Japanese woodblock printing that is noted for its vibrancy and incredible detail. www.aizuriquartet.com
Kinan Azmeh
Hailed as a “virtuoso, intensely soulful” by the New York Times and “spellbinding” by the New Yorker, Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based genre-bending composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh has been touring the globe with great acclaim as a soloist, composer and improviser. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, John McLaughlin, Aynur and Djivan Gasparian, among others. He leads his own bands Hewar and the Kinan Azmeh CityBand. He is a Silkroad ensemble artist with whom he won a Grammy in 2016. His recent orchestral album Uneven Sky with the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra Berlin has won Germany’s OpusKlassik Award in 2019.
Recent commissions include works for the Seattle Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School, the Damascus High Institute of Music, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering, Kinan holds a doctorate in music from the City University of New York. His first opera, Songs For Days To Come was premiered in Germany in June 2022 to a great success. And he has recently been appointed to the National Council For the Arts on a nomination by president Biden.
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