Titled Tfiles (Yiddish for Prayers), the work is inspired by three Yiddish poems by the Polish-born poet Kadya Molodowsky, who emigrated to America before WWII and died there in 1975. It will be performed by the American Composers Orchestra under Kedrick Armstrong.
As Carnegie Hall writes on its website, in her Yiddish poems Kadya Molodowsky "reimagined prayer as a personal search rather than a communal ritual."
It adds: “Across three movements, the clarinet moves from a plea for endurance, through a yearning toward the unknown, to a closing hymn to nature.”
Tfiles was commissioned by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and was premiered there in 2024 by Ciepliński and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michał Klauza.
Ciepliński is a graduate of the Hochschule für Musik in Basel, Switzerland, and the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Kraków.
He has appeared as a soloist with several Polish and foreign orchestras, and has done a great deal to champion Polish music as well as works by Jewish composers.
His wide-ranging activities include the Limanowa Project which features recently discovered pre-Holocaust Jewish music found in Limanowa, a small town in southern Poland.
(mk)