Edensongs (Aaron Jay Kernis) - performed by Yale Schola Cantorum - February 19, 2023

Edensongs (Aaron Jay Kernis) - performed by Yale Schola Cantorum - February 19, 2023
Aaron Jay Kernis, the composer of Edensongs, is a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-Award winning composer who draws artistic inspiration from a vast and often surprising palette of sources, among them the limitless color spectrum and immense emotional tangle of the orchestra, cantorial music in its beauty and dark intensity, the roiling drama of world events, and the energy and drive of jazz and popular music.
Peter Cole, the librettist of Edensongs, is a poet and translator whose many honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a TLS Translation Prize, the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding Jewish literature, and the 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Cole divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches each spring at Yale University.
Yale Schola Cantorum is a chamber choir that performs sacred music from the sixteenth century to the present day in concert settings and choral services around the world. The choir is directed and conducted by David Hill.
Edensongs was commissioned by the Robert S. Baker Commissioning Fund for Sacred Music at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music for Yale Schola Cantorum (David Hill, director), and by the San Francisco Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale (Richard Egarr, director).