Composer Aleksandra Vrebalov.
In Tuesday’s (12/5) San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman writes, “The Grawemeyer Award in music composition, the prestigious $100,000 prize given annually by the University of Louisville in Kentucky, has gone to Aleksandra Vrebalov’s ‘Missa Supratext,’ a piece for string and girls chorus that received its world premiere at SFJazz Center in 2018. The six-movement work, written for Kronos Quartet and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, was conceived as a wordless celebration free of any connection to specific religious tradition…. ‘Missa Supratext,’ whose premiere was conducted by Girls Chorus director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, is part of a long collaboration between Vrebalov and Kronos dating back to 1995, when she was a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In his letter nominating the piece, David Harrington, the quartet’s founder and artistic director, wrote that Vrebalov’s ‘compositional voice has blossomed into one of the most expansive I know of.’… The Serbian-born Vrebalov, who became a U.S. citizen in 2015 and now lives in New York City, has had 15 of her compositions premiered by Kronos…. The Grawemeyer Award was first given in 1985 for music composition and has since expanded to include annual prizes in ideas improving world order, education, religion and psychology.”
