Composers

Kenji Bunch

composer

Kenji Bunch writes music that looks for commonalities between musical styles, for understandings that transcend cultural or generational barriers, and for empathic connections with his listeners. Drawing on vernacular musical traditions, an interest in highlighting historical injustices and inaccuracies, and techniques from his classical training, Bunch creates music with a unique personal vocabulary that appeals to performers, audiences, and critics alike.

With his work frequently performed worldwide and recorded numerous times, Bunch considers his current mission the search for and celebration of shared emotional truths about the human experience from the profound to the absurd, to help facilitate connection and healing through entertainment, vulnerability, humor, and joy.

Mr. Bunch is widely recognized for performing his own groundbreaking works for viola. He currently serves as Artistic Director of the new music group Fear No Music and is deeply committed to music education in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Henri Lazarof

composer

Henri Lazarof was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1932. His first music lessons were with the Jesuit Lycee Francais. By his teenage years he was already a concert pianist and was beginning to study musical composition. After World War II, he left Bulgaria with his family to emigrate to Palestine/Israel, and studied composition with Paul Ben-Haim in Jerusalem (1949-1952). He won the first musical scholarship awarded in Israel to attend the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he was a student of Goffredo Petrassi (1955–1957).

Lazarof completed his studies with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero on a fellowship at Brandeis University in 1959. Thе same year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and relocated to Southern California where he at first became a teacher of French language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1962, Lazarof joined the music faculty of UCLA, teaching composition and organizing contemporary music festivals, and remained at UCLA until his retirement (1987).

By 1982, Lazarof devoted himself nearly full-time to musical composition. During his lifetime, a total of 126 of his musical works were published with Associated Music Publishers (G. Schirmer, Inc.), Theodore Presser Company, and Bote and Bock et. al. Many of his compositions were recorded by multiple classical record labels.

Lazarof's prizes included first place (?) in the International Tchaikovsky Competition; First International Competition from (?) Monaco for Concerto for Viola and Orchestra; and First International Prize City of Milan La Scala Award (?) for his musical composition Structures Sonores. He received two Grammy nominations in 1991 for Best Contemporary Composition and Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist(s) with Orchestra.

Valentin Silvestrov

composer

Born in Kiev in 1937, the Ukrainian composer and pianist Valentin Silvestrov was one of the leading figures of the Soviet musical avant-garde in the 1960s. Silvestrov turned to musical experimentation early in his career, with his works finding limited recognition in the Soviet Union. In 1974, he came under pressure to conform to the prescriptions of socialist realism, as well as to defend his departure from a composers' meeting in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For a period he withdrew from public life and gradually changed his style. It was then that he composed Quiet Songs (1977), a cycle intended for performance in private settings.

He is the author of nine symphonies, three string quartets, the symphonic poem for piano and orchestra Metamusic, of Dedication for violin and orchestra, Requiem for Larissa for choir and orchestra, and other works. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Silvestrov turned to sacred and religious themes, composing music influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music.

In the 21st century, he has worked in small forms, composing more than six hundred pieces, mostly for piano, including waltzes, lullabies, pastorals, serenades, and more. In 2022, after the Russian invasion, Silvestrov left Ukraine and moved to Berlin.

Dobrinka Tabakova

composer

Born in Plovdiv, Dobrinka Tabakova has lived in London since 1991, graduating from the Guildhall School of Music, and obtaining a PhD from King’s College London. Her ‘exciting, deeply moving’ music (Washington Times) has been featured in festivals across Europe, including the BBC Proms (UK), Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), Homecoming (Russia), World Sun Songs (Latvia) and Dark Music Days (Iceland). Tabakova has been resident composer at the Davos Summer Festival in Switzerland and Truro Cathedral, Cornwall (UK), as well as with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Swan (Stratford, UK). She has received commissions from the Royal Philharmonic Society in the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 3, and the European Broadcasting Union.

Tabakova’s debut album String Paths, released by the German label ECM Records, was nominated in the Best Classical Compendium category at the 2014 Grammy Awards. In 2017, she was appointed composer-in-residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra (BBCCO). She is a recipient of the prize for an anthem for Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee and First Prize and Medallion at the Sorel Choral Composition Contest in New York. Other significant projects include Immortal Shakespeare (2016), a cantata commemorating the British playwright's 400th death anniversary, the multi-commissioned double piano concerto Together Remember to Dance and the choir and strings work Centuries of Meditations for the Three Choirs Festival in Britain, which the PRS Foundation named one of the UK’s best contemporary compositions for the past 25 years. Tabakova’s second album, devoted to choral music and performed by the Truro Cathedral Choir with the BBCCO, was released by Regent Records, receiving a 2019 Critics’ Choice mention by Gramophone Magazine. In 2021, Dobrinka Tabakova completed her orchestral Earth Suite for the BBC Concert Orchestra and the violin concerto The Patience of Trees for the Manchester International Festival. In 2022, she was named The Halle Orchestra's Аrtist in Аssociation.

In 2023, two new comissions from Dobrinka Tabakova were premiered on a tour of the UK’s great cathedrals with vocal ensemble The Sixteen celebrating William Byrd's 400th anniversary, and a new album with The Halle Orchestra was released on the orchestra's own label. A follow-up ECM Records album is forthcoming.

Peter Kerkelov

composer

Born in a Bulgarian-Russian family in Plovdiv in 1984, Peter Kerkelov studied at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in his native city, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in classical guitar in the class of Milena and Valentin Vulchevi, and a Master’s degree in composition in the class of Professor Dimitar Tapkoff. He subsequently completed a Master’s degree in composition at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague (Netherlands), where he studied with Martijn Padding and Guus Janssen, and a PhD degree in ethnomusicology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He also specialized in composition with Professor Dan Dediu at the National University of Music in Bucharest (Romania), and has taken part in masterclasses with composers Louis Andriessen (Netherlands), David Lang (USA), and Kaija Saariaho (Finland).

Kerkelov’s music has an ascetic sincerity and directness that transcend the notion of composition as playground, aiming at the field of philosophy and borrowing from other art forms.

His music has been performed in Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, and the USA, in venues such as Konzerthaus Wien, Gaudeamus Music Week, BOZAR Brussels, and Teatro Massimo, Palermo, and by groups and artists such as the Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble (Netherlands), Bang on a Can All-Stars (USA), Ensemble PHACE (Austria), Musica Nova Sofia Ensemble (Bulgaria), Sofia Soloists (Bulgaria), Ruysdael Kwartet (Netherlands), Antonii Baryshevskyi (Ukraine), and Hayk Melikyan (Armenia).

Kerkelov has been commissioned to create work by the Trio Imàge (Berlin), the CRUSH Ensemble (Germany), the ppIANISSIMO Festival (Bulgaria), the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Dutch Chamber Music Society, and the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. He has also had a fruitful collaboration with the Bulgarian National Radio, where he has recorded Time Etudes with the BNR Orchestra and Choir conducted by Dragomir Yossifov, with Israeli soprano Reut Rivka Shabi; Attempt at Screaming with the Musica Nova Sofia Ensemble, also under Dragomir Yossifov; and Two Symphonies and Postumus with the FROSCH String Quartet.

In 2012, Attempt at Screaming won the 59th International Rostrum of Composers in Stockholm in the Under 30 Category, while in 2016, Time Etudes was labelled a “Top 10 recommended work” in the General Category of the 63rd International Rostrum of Composers in Wroclaw. He was also a finalist at the Sentieri Selvaggi Composition Competition in Milan (Italy), and has received scholarships from the Richard Wagner Stipendienstiftung – Bayreuth (Germany), the Schuurman Schimmel van Outeren Stichting (Netherlands), and the Raina Kabaivanska Foundation (Italy/Bulgaria).

Currently, Kerkelov is a Senior Research Assistant in Ethnomusicology at the Institute of Art Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Assistant Professor in Orchestration at the Prof. Pancho Vladigerov National Music Adademy in Sofia. He is represented exclusively by the Dutch contemporary music publisher DONEMUS.