From the press

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“Every sound in this performance flew straight into the soul, including the sound of the drops of sweat that fell from Yedid's hair and landed on the piano keys.”

Ben Shalev, Haaretz

 

“…Pianist/composer Yitzhak Yedid’s Oud Bass Piano Trio conveys terrific tension, aggravation and release. It’s a stunner. Minimizing the distinction between composition and improvisation, the music is entrusted to supple hands.” 

Randal McIlroy, Coda Magazine

 

“The music is very powerful, almost relentless in its expressiveness. Moving through many sonorities, densities and dynamics, the three players can be heard, individually and as a group, changing roles from improvisers to interpreters and back again”

Budd Kopman

 

“Yitzhak Yedid's musicality resides on a higher plane while offering bountiful panoramas for the mind's eye”

Glenn Astarita

 

“To hear such a young man as you feeling the music so deeply is a very pleasant experience.”

Lee Konitz

 

“Yitzhak Yedid’s trio explores a wide range of emotions and tones, even if a dark and mournful mood prevails. The musicians’ vivid interpretations produce a positive flow of energy that keeps the music alert and compelling, and Yedid is capable of striking lyricism. Jazz musicians often describe their art as storytelling. Yedid embodies this."

Alain Drouot, Downbeat Magazine

 

“Yedid's masterful musical storytelling is directly engaging, with forms that continually shift and mutate, but which also move inexorably forward. Complex, seemingly chaotic sections are juxtaposed against beautiful hymn-like melodies. The music might descend to the depths sounding like a boiling compressed cauldron, only to open up the next moment, expanding into the clouds”

Budd Kopman

 

“Yitzhak Yedid is the quintessential cross-genre artist. He is a wonderful storyteller, his compositions can be challenging and require the listener to sit up and take stock of what is evolving.”

Barry Bavis, Downbeat Magazine 

 

“Composer and pianist Yitzhak Yedid's new composition is an impressive attempt to weave current and traditional styles and influences into a cohesive contemporary work. In this five part suite, premiered at the Oud Festival in Jerusalem in November 2005 and recorded nine months later, there are references and retentions from a wide spectrum of sources, including Jewish and Christian prayers and benedictions, Arabic folk music, modern Western music and avant-garde jazz—all fused through Yedid's optimistic belief that these varied cultures can co-exist peacefully.”

Eyal Hareuveni

 

“Yitzhak Yedid created a work with a heady high concept that's still eminently musical. His composed suite with improvised passages avoids falling into the usual jazz trappings. It suggests classicism without wading into pretension”

Kurt Gottschalk, The New York City Jazz Record

 

“Thoughtfulness and a healthy sense of adventure are both major assets on this excellent disc”

Alex Henderson, All Music Guide

 

“Yitzhak Yedid’s trio consists of several elements drawn from Judaic and Christian tradition and meditations on multiple modes of silence, including the ‘non-believer’s silence’, and the prayers of priests and kabbalists as well as a Palestinian Bride and repeats of a motif entitled ‘Imaginary ritual belly dance’.”

Stuart Broomer

 

“This stands out as a rich album, full of powerful emotive force and passion for storytelling.”

Tom Sekowski, gaz-eta

 

“Yitzhak Yedid integrated specific stylistic influences into a personal created unity. The manner in which he describes folkloristic influences and melancholic specific themes can remind of Bela Bartok; improvisatory float of hovering à la Keith Jarret”.

Åke Holmquist, Norra Skåne (Sweden)

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Angels' Revolt - Yitzhak Yedid, KLASSIK Magazine

 

Music against war

 

Label / Publisher: Challenge Classics

Detailed information about the title discussed

 

Yitzhak Yedid's compositions inspire with sweeping sound dynamics.

 

With the title 'Angels' Revolt', Yitzhak Yedid (born 1971) provides a narrative framework as a common thread for his highly complex multicultural compositions. On his new CD he presents four independent works, which he composed in 2016 and 2017 and which were recorded live. It is through and through very serious, oppressive, tension-laden works, battle battles, saber-sacked sound revolts as an expression of today's war realities that give room for different interpretations. According to Yedid, it is precisely the uncertainty of how the listeners will react to this, combined with his enthusiasm for composing, which triggers 'electrifying energies'.

 

The Israeli-Australian composer and concert pianist is one of the world's leading composers. In his multicultural compositions based on western avant-garde, free jazz and post-modern classical music, mixed with Arabic music systems of different genres and Arabic-influenced Jewish music, he developed a very individual style of composition. The way he composes has a lot to do with his multicultural roots. Born in 1971 to an Iraqi-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father in Jerusalem, with music studies in the United States and later residence in Australia, Yedid grew up at the intersection of different cultures, with Western culture predominating musically, the Arabic and Jewish rhythms as emotionalizing sound elements work.

 

Explosive and stirring

 

In this way, Yedid oscillates between cultures, their special instruments and sound patterns. Traditional Arabic harmonies and klezmer melodies thwart free jazz-like sound storms. In the middle of it, classical European improvisations sound, Bach and Béla Bartók become audible. Yedid doesn't mix them up, but lets them suddenly appear, collide, and just as surprisingly disappear. In their western clashes of sound, they create peace through their dance rhythm. With every composition, these contrasts are extremely explosive and thrilling from the very first note. The orchestral piece 'Kiddushim Ve' Killulim '(' Blessing and Curse ') circles around the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, premiered by the Israel Netanya Kibbutz Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Christian Lindberg.

 

'Chat Gadya' ('The Little Goat'), a piece for clarinet, violin, cello and piano based on a Jewish children's song, has a balm effect on it. It is the most lyrical piece and the longest on this CD with over 14 minutes. Yedid composed the quartet as commissioned work on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Stradbroke Island Chamber Music Festival and, inspired by the beautiful nature of the island, conceived it as anti-war music in memory of the tragic turmoil of the world. Short motifs alternating between 12/8 and 11/8 time, played around by extremely delicate clay fabrics and sonorous tones, are attacked by increasingly aggressive tone storms, which suddenly calm down, giving room to a mourning march rhythm.

 

Psychogram of a time of horror Even more moving is Yedid's 'Concerto for piano and strings', which he composed in 2016 against the backdrop of the Syrian war. In three parts, he enhances apocalyptic scenarios as a never-ending, constantly flaring sound storm. From the contrast of a Bach-like melody and massive piano chords in depth, Yedid develops an exploding, deeply moving soundscape. The first part begins very calmly with individual tones, contrasted with dark bell tones, which conjure up depressing images after the battle is fought and, through shrill, rattling, shimmering, ice-cold individual sound lines, act like a requiem on the previous massacre. Piano melodies find their way, but bright shimmer, dull thunder, violent chords, Locomotive-like rhythms repeatedly smash harmonies that begin, condense into a thunderstorm of sound, into the psychogram of a period of horror. In the second and third part, the dynamic and tonal contrasts become even more intense. Oriental harmonies appear, are literally smashed tonally. Whirring and pounding tell of the apparent pause, but saber-like, sharpening clay fronts march on. As it began, the piece ends with the chimes of death.

 

The piano piece 'Angels' Revolt' ignites in passionate rhythm in the style of Olivier Messiaen with extremely many tremoli. Yedid composed it for the prestigious Lev Vassenko piano competition, inspired by the Arabian Santur. Under the hands of Rachael Shipard there is a narrative, tonally highly complex fireworks with gigantic runs of the right and massive chords of the left, rapid tempos, abrupt turns and meditative pause. The rebellion rages above the realm of the deep in the high tone regions, calms down transcendently in the middle section, the boiling of the deep can only be heard very subtly, swells and ends with incredible speed chasing across the entire tone range. This CD is an energetic event.

 

Michaela Schabel, KLASSIK Magazine, review by Michaela Schabel , 04.03.2020​​​​​​​​​​

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