“Intensely soulful… Virtuoso” The New York Times
“[Azmeh’s] rhapsodic clarinet [is] able to seduce with a rare intimacy and explode in ecstasy.”
Los-Angeles Times
“Spellbinding!” The New Yorker
“brilliant liquidity and meltingly beautiful tone” The Times, London
Hailed by critics and audiences alike, Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based Kinan Azmeh has built an international career around the idea of the complete musician: an artist for whom composing, performing, improvising, and collaborating are not separate disciplines, but interconnected ways of making music.
Equally at home in the classical concert hall, the jazz club, and the world-music stage, Azmeh has developed a singular musical voice that moves freely across genres and disciplines His career reflects a lifelong desire to bring together the different dimensions of the musician—creator and interpreter, composer and performer, individual voice and collective improviser.
Azmeh has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Bavarian Radio, Montreal Symphony, West-Eastern Divan Orchestras and the NDR BigBand among many others. He has performed at some of the world’s most prominent venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the UN General Assembly, Royal Albert Hall, Elbphilharmonie, Teatro Colón, the Opera Bastille, the Tchaikovsky Grand Hall, and the Kennedy Center. His collaborators have included Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, John McLaughlin, Marcel Khalife, François Rabbath, Aynur, and Djivan Gasparian. Since 2012, he has also been a member of the Silkroad Ensemble, appearing as both clarinetist and composer on its Grammy Award-winning album Sing Me Home.
His compositions span solo, chamber, and orchestral music, as well as opera, film, electronics, and multimedia, with commissions by the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Knights, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Elbphilharmonie, Brooklyn Rider, Aizuri Quartet, Cello Octet Amsterdam, and Bob Wilson, among others. His album Uneven Sky with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin received the OPUS KLASSIK Award in 2019. His first opera, Songs for Days to Come, fully sung in Arabic, premiered in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2022. He also leads his own Arab-Jazz quartet, Kinan Azmeh CityBand, and is a founding member of the Syrian improvising ensemble Hewar.
His artistry has inspired an extensive body of music written specifically for him, including eight concertos and dozens of chamber works by composers from around the world. Kinan’s work and life have been also the subjects of several documentary films including “Music of Strangers” by academy-award winning American director Morgan Neville, and the recent documentary “Half Moon” by Dutch film maker Frank Scheffer.
He is a graduate of The Juilliard School as a student of Charles Neidich, and of both the Damascus High Institute of Music where he studied with Shukry Sahwki, Nicolay Viovanof, and Anatoly Moratof, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering. Kinan earned a Doctor of Musical Arts from the City University of New York in 2013.
Kinan Azmeh serves on the United States National Council for the Arts.
www.kinanazmeh.com
