Composer

Described as “energetic and good humored” (The Big City), “fun and uplifting” (Betsy’s View), and “dramatic” (Artsong Update), the music of Ezra Donner (b. 1986) has been performed in New York’s Carnegie Hall and throughout the world by ensembles including The Chamber Orchestra of New York, Pittsburgh Camerata, and Akropolis Quintet.  Awards and recognition have come from The American Prize Competition, the Respighi Prize Competition, and the Music Teachers’ National Association, the Boston New Music Initiative, the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, ClefWorks, and the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series.

Ezra studied composition at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, earning his Doctor of Music Degree in 2015. He is also an alumnus of Interlochen Arts Camp, the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, and Brevard Music Center. His teachers have included Claude Baker, Don Freund, P.Q. Phan, Michael Colgrass, Bright Sheng, and William Bolcom.

Reviews of Ezra’s compositions:

“The score is Italian verismo, updated and made American through language, O’Neill’s inescapably stark New England and composer Donner’s own gift at establishing mood and tone. The music strongly hints of Puccini and his disciples. It draws one in, being melodic, lushly orchestrated and dramatic, eminently suited to O’Neill’s tragic material.”
Herald Times Online

The final work was the most dramatic: Ezra Donner’s operatic adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Ile, about a ship and crew at sea for two years searching for a full cargo of whale oil. The impressive Kenneth Weber was the obsessed Captain Keeney, who puts down a mutiny (“I’m the law on this ship!”) by crewmen who want to turn the ship for home. As his wife, Signe Mortensen brought out the intense loneliness of a woman on a ship, hungry for the sound of a woman’s voice; she begged her husband to turn around or she’ll go mad. He promised to — and then reneged. She snapped, laughing crazily and, on the organ he brought aboard for her comfort, playing an insane mishmash of hymn tunes — including a brief snatch of the hymn tune known as the Navy Hymn — “for those in peril on the sea.” Both Weber and Mortensen had the power and skill to make every word count.
from a review by M.D. Ridge in Artsong Update, June 2012

The standout pieces on the program were two works by Donner….His Sonata No. 1 for Piano and Sonata Judaica for clarinet and piano performed the vital action of setting their own premises and then attacking them a little bit. The duo was energetic and good humored, incorporating the flavor of Jewish melodies into Modernist structures with just enough touches of popular culture and craziness to also try and break out of them. It offered…a very open-hearted and human approach to music making. The piano sonata, played by Donner, was an exciting, impressive work…tossing off interesting, jazzy and often intensely energetic phrases, abandoning them and bringing them back just at the moment one thinks he’s forgotten about them.  It seems random but is actually continuous. The material is dense but the writing is always clear, even in the inner voices.
from a review by George Grella in The Big City, March 10, 2010