The New Recording of an Important Opera Composed by a Jewish Theological Seminary Assistant Professor in the H. L. Miller Cantorial School The recording of Steal a Pencil for Me, an opera by composer Gerald Cohen (Assistant Professor, H. L. Miller Cantorial School) and librettist Deborah Brevoort, has just been released on Sono Luminus Recordings. Read […]

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is thrilled to present a special Q&A with HUC-JIR faculty member Cantor Gerald Cohen, the composer of Steal a Pencil for Me, an opera in two acts that captures one of the Holocaust’s most poignant love stories. Created by Cantor Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort, the opera is set against […]

Review by Barry KilpatrickJan-Feb 2024American Record Guide (Vol. 87, Issue 1) COHEN: Voyagers; Playing for Our Lives; Preludes & Debka Narek Arutyunian, cl; Colin Williams, trb; Cassatt Quartet. innova Recordings 090. 65 minutes Here is the Cassatt Quartet in works by Gerald Cohen. Two are collaborations with soloists. The 4-movement, 29-minute Voyagers (2017) has clarinetist […]

Read the full review at Gerald Cohen, Voyagers, New Music for String Quartet, Clarinet and Trombone, Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review. “What matters in the end is the authentic and dedicated performativity of it all, the highly crafted and careful building of a particular work from the ground up with great care, skill, and eloquently inventive […]

Pittsfield High string quartet channels a dark but defiant corner of music history in ‘Playing for Our Lives’ Posted Monday, July 15, 2019 6:42 pm, Berkshire Eagle By Jenn Smith Here for link to original article in the Berkshire Eagle LENOX — Out of one of the darkest eras in human history, the Holocaust, rose some powerful musical performances […]

…[Clarinetist Vasko] Dukovski brought clarity and agility to both works, and also to Gerald Cohen’s “Voyagers” (2017), in which he joined the Cassatt players, on several kinds of clarinets, in a tribute to the two Voyager spacecrafts, launched in 1977 and still hurtling through space. There are, as you might expect, passages that evoke the eerie loneliness of the spacecrafts’ journeys. But much of the work is vigorously animated.

Cohen based parts of the score on pieces from the Voyagers’ golden discs – selections of music, natural sounds, speech and photographs, meant to convey an impression of Earth to distant civilizations that might decode them. His choices were a Renaissance dance, a Beethoven quartet and a Hindustani vocal piece, but though he briefly quotes each, he quickly deconstructs them and spins imaginative fantasies around their essential elements in his own freewheeling, largely neo-Romantic style…