Yotam Haber

His music hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians in “2014 Faces To Watch,” and chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440, Yotam Haber was born in Holland and grew up in Israel, Nigeria, and Milwaukee. He is the recipient of a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, a 2013 NYFA award, the 2007 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

In 2015, Haber’s first monographic album of chamber music, Torus, was released on Roven Records and distributed by Naxos to wide critical acclaim, hailed by New York’s WQXR as “a snapshot of a soul in flux – moving from life to the afterlife, from Israel to New Orleans – a composer looking for a sound and finding something powerful along the way.”

Recent commissions include works for Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor; an evening-length oratorio for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra; CalARTS@REDCAT/Disney Hall (Los Angeles); New York-based Contemporaneous, Gabriel Kahane, and Alarm Will Sound; the 2015 New York Philharmonic CONTACT! Series; the Venice Biennale; Bang on a Can Summer Festival; Neuvocalsolisten Stuttgart and ensemble l’arsenale; FLUX Quartet, JACK Quartet, Cantori New York, the Tel Aviv-based Meitar Ensemble, and the Berlin-based Quartet New Generation.

New works-in-progress include a new quartet for the Kronos Quartet in collaboration with the electronic performer Philip White co-commissioned by Kronos and Carnegie Hall; and a chamber opera, The Voice Imitator, with librettist Royce Vavrek.

Haber is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of New Orleans and Artistic Director Emeritus of MATA, the nonprofit organization founded by Philip Glass that has, since 1996, been dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works by young composers from around the world. His music is published by RAI Trade.

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. A golden, perfect, salty plate of french fries
2. The patience and sense of breadth of the Schubert late piano sonatas (especially D. 960) and the Quintet in C, which is, I think, the last thing on earth I’d want to hear (Ok, I know that’s two things, sorry)
3. Tennis
4. A piano
5. P.G. Wodehouse who never fails to make me laugh in the most dire moments
6. My wife’s luminous paintings that I can stare at for hours
7. A great cigar every once and a while
8. My little, wonderous one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. In her eyes I see all possibilities.
9. A hunk of parmigiano-reggiano cheese. One’s home is empty without it. Indespensible.
10. The sea