Shocking and very sad news: composer and Berkeley music professor Jorge Liderman died Sunday morning after being struck by a BART train at El Cerrito station. The only witness was the train's operator, who reported that he saw Liderman jump off the platform. The Chron report, by Joshua Kosman, is here; Liderman's personal Web site is here.
Liderman was just 50 and had been feted in a recent Cal Performances concert to celebrate his reaching that birthday; read Jason Victor Sirenus's review here.
A new work by him is on the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert Monday night, Feb. 4, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I have the concert on my calendar and had been thinking of attending; works by Feldman and Mackey are also on the program.
I have a CD of Liderman's "Aires de Sefarad," performed by Duo46; it's been sitting near my computer to be blogged for, well, months. I like the piece very much and had been hoping to hear some of his music in person.
3 comments:
This is very sad news; we have lost a bright light in the music world. I performed Jorge's lovely Trio for clarinet, piano, and percussion at the Nov. 2007 Cal Performances concert with colleagues Karen Rosenak and Florian Conzetti. It was a pleasure to have had a part in such playful, buoyant, logical music---seemingly light-hearted yet tender and thoughtful, with a kaleidoscopic sense of rhythm and harmony.
Here's to playing and hearing his works in the future. He will be missed!
Carey, thank you. I am so sorry I missed the birthday concert. (And welcome - your playing has been one of the great pleasures of attending the opera, and now the symphony.)
I'm stunned. I dont know what to say. I sang in the UC Berkeley chamber chorus from 1996-2003, and had the honor of performing two of his choral/vocal works: Sephardisms II & the premiere of Song of Songs. Liderman's works were by far the most vocally resonant of all the academic music I sang while at Cal.
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