Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran has been chosen for our 2016 Sorel Commission!

SongFest is thrilled to announce that Pulitzer Prize-winnig composer Shulamit Ran will be writing a new song cycle for our 20th anniversary season this June, thanks to the generous support of the Sorel Organization.

“Shulamit Ran has never forgotten that a vital essence of composition is communication.” So ran the review in the Chicago Tribunefollowing the premiere of Legends by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This sort of reaction is by no means unusual. Around the country, from Seattle to Baltimore to Houston, commentary on her music typically runs thus: “gloriously human”, and “compelling not only for its white-hot emotional content but for its intelligence and compositional clarity,” — “Ran is a magnificent composer.” It is hardly surprising, then, that Symphony, which has drawn references to “the superior quality of her musical imagination and artistic invention” and which has been hailed as “a work that will reward each new listening” should have won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ms. Ran’s work displays an emotional quality and technical superiority that has led critics to acclaim her work as “written with the same sense of humanity found in Mozart’s most profound opera arias or Mahler’s searching symphonies.” (learn more about Shulamit Ran and her work...)