Description

• Composer: Robert Stern (1934-2018)
• Editor: Michael David Golzmane
• Instrumentation: Viola
• Binding:
• ISMN: 9790600237418
• Size: 8.9 x 12.0 inches
• Pages: None

Description

Editor’s Note:

Robert Stern’s Recitative (Yom Teruah) originated in 2001 at the request of cellist Matt Haimovitz, then professor of cello at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Haimovitz had asked Stern—himself also on the faculty there—to compose a short solo work for the RNCM Manchester International Cello Festival. Written amid the composer’s concurrent immersion in his large-scale oratorio Shofar , the Recitative became an offshoot of that larger spiritual landscape, drawing directly on the oratorio’s motivic and harmonic material. The title, Yom Teruah (“Day of the Blowing of the Shofar”), refers to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The piece is both invocation and reflection—a ritual fragment in sound. Its rhetoric echoes the prophetic style of a liturgical recitative: declamatory, sounding often unmetered, by turns commanding and imploring.

Revised 2006