32 Bright Clouds: Beethoven Conversations around the World

For the occasion of Beethoven’s 250th birthday year in 2020, composers from current and former conflict zones were commissioned by Israeli American pianist Yael Weiss to create new works connected to Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. For this YouTube Premiere concert, she performs new compositions by Syrian native Malek Jandali, Turkish composer Aslihan Keçebasoglu, Afghan composer Milad Yousufi, Jordanian composer Saed Haddad, and Sidney Boquiren of the Philippines. Interspersed with these new works are selected movements from the Beethoven sonatas that inspired them, including his complete Sonatas Nos. 27 and 28. In addition to responding to a particular Beethoven sonata, each new work incorporates the “Dona nobis pacem” motif from his Missa Solemnis, which Beethoven labelled, “A call for inward and outward peace.”

The Washington Post has described Yael Weiss as “a pianist who delves deeply and tellingly into that cloudy area where fantasy morphs into improvisation, inventiveness being common to both.” After her New York debut at the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Times praised her “remarkably powerful and intense…fine technique and musicianship in the service of an arresting array of music.”

In addition to his composing career, Malek Jandali has spoken on Syrian cultural preservation and human rights at Harvard, Fordham, Duke, the Skoll World Form at Oxford, Aspen Ideas Festival, the United Nations, the Doha Debates at Georgetown University in Qatar, and TEDx. He was a visiting scholar in 2017–18 at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University.