Each week, we will post a different album that will make your Wednesday way easier!
LIVING IN THE BODY, by Lori Laitman
About the album:
Lori Laitman is one of America's leading vocal composers. These 49 songs were composed between 1997 and 2017 to texts by celebrated poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Dana Gioia, David Mason, Sylvia Plath, and Joyce Sutphen, on topics that range from the profound emotional impact of the Holocaust, to humorous truths of everyday life, and the comedy and tenderness of childhood. This stunning program of world premiere recordings is performed by an all-star cast that includes the composer herself.
Verdina Shlonsky was the first female Israeli composer, pianist, publicist and painter. Verdina (Rosa) Shlonsky was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in the Russian Empire, the youngest of six children. (The Hebrew root of the name Verdina is וורד "vered" or "rose".)
The family immigrated to Palestine in 1921, but she remained in Vienna to continue her music education. From there, she moved to Berlin, where she studied with pianists Egon Petri and Artur Schnabel. In Paris, she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, Edgard Varèse and Max Deutsch. In 1925, she and her sister a successful opera singer Judith Shlonsky (Nina Valery), who had returned to Europe, married two brothers: Sigmund and Alexander Sternik. Both couples soon divorced.
Upon settling in Palestine, she joined the faculty of the Tel Aviv Academy of Music. Among her noted compositions were "Hebrew Poem" (1931) and "Quartet for Strings", which won an award at the 1948 Béla Bartók Competition in Budapest.
She was the younger sister of poet Avraham Shlonsky, and older sister of the mezzo-soprano Nina Valery.
ILSE FROMM-MICHAELS - GERMANY DIED 22 JANUARY Ilse Fromm-Michaels was born in Hamburg and showed musical talent at an early age. She studied music in Berlin, first at the Hochschule fur Musik with Heinrich van Eyken for composition and with Marie Bender for piano. In 1905 she began study at the Sternsche Conservatory of Hans Pfitzner and James Kwast and completed her studies in 1913 with conductor and composer Fritz Steinbach and pianist Carl Friedberg in Cologne.
In 1908 Fromm-Michaels began a career as a concert pianist, often playing her own works. She married Hamburg judge Dr. Walter Michaels, and after the Nuremberg Race Laws were instituted by the Nazis was banned from performing or publishing her compositions. She continued teaching music, and after World War II established the Hamburg First School of Music and Drama. In 1964 she was awarded the City of Hamburg's Johannes Brahms Medal. In 1973 she moved to Detmold to be near her son, and died there in 1986.
