Jasmine Festival 2015

The Jasmine Festival is an annual festival that has been primarily hosted in Ramallah since the spring of 2011, with concerts also held in several other Palestinian towns and cities such as Bethlehem, Nablus, Shafamer, Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The festival, which revolves around Classical, Jazz, and World music, is an integral part of the ESNCM mission to promote music in Palestinian society in its different genres and forms. The Jasmine Festival brings together Palestinian and international musicians to share their experiences and music, and introduce their music to the Palestinian public. As well as the concerts, the Jasmine Festival also provides opportunities for ESNCM students to attend workshops, masterclasses and lectures given by the visiting musicians.

Watar Band

Venues:

Ramallah	03/03/2015 - 19:00	ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street
Jerusalem	04/03/2015 - 18:00	Yabous Cultural Center

Watar Band was founded in 2008, and participated in a number of local concerts between the years 2009 and 2011. In 2012 the group traveled to Belfort in the East of France, to participate in the Universities Music Festival, FIMU, playing two concerts there to audiences of 4000.

The group then returned to Gaza and re-launched in its current formation of 6 members. Watar played in Gaza’s biggest ever music concert on 24th June 2014, in the World Music Day event organized by the French Cultural Center in Gaza. Over 700 people attended the event, which was Watar’s third appearance at World Music Day. Watar’s music straddles the genres of pop and soft rock, with an Eastern twist. The band hopes to release its first album by mid-2015, and through the album to reach wider audiences and international festivals.

Zaridash

Venues:

Ramallah

04/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

Zaridash Is a mixed a cappella choir which is based in Ramallah and has been singing together since 2001. It is a four-voice choir of women and men, and its members come both from Palestine and the community of Internationals living in Palestine.

Zaridash programs typically feature a mixed programme from around the world, including Arabic songs in original arrangements, Andalusian Muwashahat, contemporary classical music, jazz, and folk songs from South America to Northern Scandinavia and across all meridians.

Zaridash is a community choir, and is run by its members and conductors on a voluntary basis, purely for the joy of music. It is conducted during this season by Diego Alamar, Jay Crossland and Robin Burlton.

The Pianist Tuluyhan Uğurlu - Turkey

Venues:

Ramallah

05/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

Tuluyhan Ugurlu started studying piano at an early age. After graduating high school and Municipal Conservatory in Istanbul, he entered Vienna Music Academy, continuing his education on piano and composition.

Ugurlu focused on ethnic classical new age music and started performing his own works.

Ugurlu has given improvisation-based concerts in many cultural centers of the world accompanied by photos taken from NASA & European Observatories. In Turkey, Tuluyhan Ugurlu became famous with the soundtrack album of ‘Istanbul beneath my Wings’. Another highlight of Tuluyhan Ugurlu’s career is the Symphony Turk. This is a synthesis of classical western music and classical eastern music, and combines the playing of the Cemil Resit Rey Symphony Orchestra, the Military Band “Mehter Takimi”, and various Turkish classical music instruments (baglama, rebab, bendir, nay and oud), as well as the composer on piano.

After 2003, he started a new project and took his concerts from concert halls to historical places. Some of his works in this project were “The Temples of the Holy East”, “The Key of the Three Golden Cities: Hattusha, Tushba and Troy”, and “Istanbul, A World Capital”. During the performance of this last work, stories are presented together with a multi-media show consisting of nearly 200 paintings, engravings and photographs. In 2003 he carried his piano to a height of 2150 meters and sent messages of peace to the world with his concert on Nemrut Mountain, Mesopotamia.

His last album, Istanbul again: Istanbul Forever, went on sale in August 2010.

Innocent Sorcerers Quartet - Italy

Venues:

Ramallah	06/03/2015 - 19:00	ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street
Jerusalem	07/03/2015 - 18:00	Yabous Cultural Center

The quartet was founded in Turin (Italy) less than two years ago, from Alessandro Dell'Anna’s idea to revive the musical work of Krzysztof Komeda, a well-known composer in Poland, where he mostly lived (1931-1970), but who is almost forgotten elsewhere, perhaps because of his premature death.

Komeda was renowned for his artistic union with Roman Polansky, whose films’ sound tracks he composed in the 1960s. Ingenui Perversi rearranged some of this music for jazz quartet, as well as some tunes from Komeda's only jazz album ever produced, the wonderful and groundbreaking "Astigmatic" (1965). The aim is to emphasize some of its features such as simplicity, freedom, and its unsettling capacity, so fitting to the theater of the absurd that so deeply influenced Polansky's first movies.

Alessandro Dell'Anna - tenor sax Fabio Gorlier - piano Marco Piccirillo - double bass Donato Stolfi - drums

Map of the Piano: Dina Shilleh and Hannah Gallagher

Venues:

Ramallah

07/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

Dina Shilleh and Hannah Gallagher present an evening of piano music for four hands from all corners of the world: France, Spain, Russia and Serbia/Palestine.

Come and enjoy watching these two wonderful musicians take on the piano together, and listen to beautiful works for the genre by Debussy, De Falla, Rachmaninov and Shilleh.

Dina Shilleh started her piano studies at the Belgrade primary school of Music - “Josip Slavenski”. She continued her basic music education at the Edward Said National Conservatory under the instruction of Salwa Tabri and Nadia Abboushi. Dina holds a Masters Degree in Piano Performance from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Bachelors Degree in Piano Performance from Lawrence University. She has taught piano and music theory at a number of institutions in Palestine and currently teaches at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.

Hannah Gallagher is an Irish pianist currently based in Palestine. She studied Music at the University of Edinburgh, and completed her Masters in Piano Performance at the Royal Welsh College of Music. Since moving to Palestine and joining the piano faculty of the ESNCM, she has enjoyed collaborating with other musicians and has taken great pleasure in playing music by Palestinian composers. Hannah has been teaching piano and flute in the Nablus branch of ESNCM since 2013.

Varsha Agrawal, Lalit Mahant and Asit Goswami – Traditional Indian Music

Venues:

Ramallah

08/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

Dr. Varsha Agrawal (santoor) started learning vocals and tabla at the age of six. Subsequently she learned vocals, tabla and santoor under the able guidance of Lalit Mahantji Ujjain.

Varsha is the only female artist of Sufiyana Gharana from India who has received international recognition for her performance on Santoor. She is a regular artist on All India Radio. She is Professor in Music at Vikram University, Ujjain, where amongst her duties is guiding students in PhD research. Varsha has received many awards in India, including Woman of the Year in 2012.

Pandit Lalit Mahant (tabla) was born in Ujjain, Madhyar Pradesh. His inclination for music was recognized first by his father. Later he was sent to the world famous tabla player Padma-Vibhusan Pandit Kishan Maharaj for advanced training, and learned vocals and tabla under the guidance of Riz Ram Desad. Lalit has also organized many prestigious national music programs. His papers, interviews and performances have been broadcast by AIR and telecast on Indian Television. He is known not only for his personal achievements but also for teaching a number of excellent students who are learning tabla, violin, sitar, santoor, vocals and dance.

Asit Goswami (sitar) is from Rajasthan, and was born into a family of musical talent. He learned under the tutelage of his father Jash Karan Goswami, a well-known sitar player. He is a regular broadcaster on All India Radio and Indian Television, and has also released a CD of Sarod-Sitar duets with his identical twin brother, Amit.

The Ramallah Jazz Quartet

Venues:

Ramallah

09/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

The Ramallah Jazz Quartet was formed in 2013 by pianist Dimitri Mikelis, and consists of Palestinian and international members who live and perform in Palestine. It is the only local band of its kind, with its mission to promote jazz around the area with an exciting performance in every show.

The RJQ music includes a selection from the American jazz standards repertoire and more.

Phil Day - Trumpet

Dimitri Mikelis - Piano

Jay Crossland - Bass

Mohammad Karzon - Drums

Opus

Venues:

Ramallah

10/03/2015 - 19:00

ESNCM Hall, Tunis Street

Opus is a classical chamber music ensemble comprising music teachers at the ESNCM. It was established in 1999, and it is designed as a flexible ensemble which plays a wide variety of chamber combinations.

One of the major works to be performed by Opus in this concert is Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”. It was first performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in modern-day Poland, on a cold and rainy night in January 1941. Having been captured as a soldier during the German invasion of France, Olivier Messiaen composed with pens and music paper provided by a prison guard with anti-Nazi tendencies. Messiaen's inspiration stemmed from a passage in the Book of Revelation: "In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, 'There shall be time no longer."' Of originally eight movements, Opus will perform the four that were written for the full quartet.

Bettina Ezbidi - Cello

Maddalena Falda - Piano

Tomasz Pajak - Violin

Melissa von Itter - Clarinet

Daniele Spada - Cello

Ahmed Qatamesh - Flute

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Jasmine Festival 2015