Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things to know about Home Within, streaming from April 23 via the Chan Centre
Silkroad Ensemble’s haunting ode to Syria blends Kinan Azmeh’s mournful clarinet and Kevork Mourad’s projected drawings
Photo by Piotr Połoczański
HARD TO BELIEVE, but last month marked the 10th agonizing anniversary of the Syrian War.
As a fitting reminder, the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts is wrapping up its Dot Com series this week with Silkroad Ensemble’s haunting Home Within. The audio-visual performance, created by Syrian composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and Syrian-Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad, reflects on the Syrian revolution and its aftermath in emotional and abstract new ways.
Here are five things to know about the performance, recorded at New York City’s Baryshnikov Arts Center. The digital performance premieres on April 23 at 7 pm, with a livestreamed conversation immediately following the virtual premiere. The concert will be available by demand until May 31.
The pair originally conceived the project to support Syrian refugees who fled the country after the 2011 uprising. Proceeds have gone to aid organizations like Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders.
Cello star Yo-Yo Ma created Silkroad in 1998 as an artistic reaction to rapid globalization, with the goal of showing the possibilities for working together. The project has been involved in commissioning and performing more than 60 new musical and multimedia works from composers and arrangers from around the world. Both Azmeh and Mourad are longtime members, Azmeh featuring as a clarinetist and composer on the ensemble’s 2017 Grammy-winning album Sing Me Home. The two artists appear in the 2015 Silkroad documentary film The Music of Strangers.
Originally from Damascus, Syria, and now based in New York City, Azmeh works as a solo clarinetist, composer and improviser. He graduated from New York’s famed Juilliard School and also holds an electrical-engineering degree. Azmeh used to regularly travel back to Damascus, where he played in a Syrian chamber group and gave numerous concerts, until the civil war. He made the news in March 2017 because he was stuck in Beirut, unable to return to New York for weeks even though he had a legal US visa, following President Donald Trump’s executive order disallowing Syrians and citizens of six other countries from entering the country.
Born in Qamishli, Syria, Kevork Mourad lives and works in New York City as well. He employs live drawing and animation in concert with musicians, with recent commissions including Israel in Egypt for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Sound of Stone to accompany the exhibition “Armenia!” for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and visuals for Beethoven’s Fidelio for the Korea National Opera. For this show, Mourad draws his artwork in real time on projections, with computer animations woven in.
The project began with a single song: Azmeh composed the mournful “A Sad Morning, Every Morning” in 2012 and has opened every performance since then with it. The piece forms the cornerstone of the multimedia project, and you can see it below. It will give you an excellent idea of the mood of Home Within. Azmeh has called the piece “A little prayer for home. Dedicated to all those who have fallen in Syria”.
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