Biography
Praised for his “fascinating, surprising, rich, and colorful” music by Haaretz, Udi Perlman (b. 1990) is an Israeli composer based in Berlin, recognized as one of his country’s “most promising contemporary composers.” With vibrant harmonies and kaleidoscopic textures, his compositions capture the expression and beauty hidden within simple musical gestures through imaginative recontextualization and playful juxtapositions. Fueled by a deep love for the Western classical canon, Perlman engages with classical conventions and tropes, reinterpreting them through his personal cultural lens and drawing on the influences of his Jewish-Israeli roots.
Perlman’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Symphonieorchester der Universität der Künste Berlin, Yale Philharmonia, Ensemble Modern Academy, Meitar Ensemble, Israel Contemporary Players, Tacet(i), Tremolo Ensemble, MultiPiano, Lysander Piano Trio, Yale Glee Club, and The Israeli Vocal Ensemble, among others. He is the recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pogorzelski-Yankee Award from the American Guild of Organists, the Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize from Yale School of Music, the Israeli Prime Minister's Composer Award, and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation's Aviv Competitions Composition Prize. An artist fellow at MacDowell, I-Park Foundation, and Herrenhaus Edenkoben, he has also held fellowships at the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, and Meitar Ensemble's Tedarim Project. He is currently a fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
As an orchestrator and arranger, Perlman has worked with a wide range of ensembles, with a particularly fruitful collaboration with the genre-bending Jerusalem Street Orchestra. Serving as the orchestra’s Artistic Advisor, Perlman also directs The Jerusalem Street Orchestra Mentorship Program, which trains early-career composers in orchestration and arranging. In addition, Perlman brings his orchestral arranging expertise to the Berlin School of Popular Arts at SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, where he teaches his self-designed course, "Arranging Popular Music for Strings.”
Recent and upcoming projects include Alphabet Cantata, a new work for Ensemble Arava (Germany); a new work for Asambura Ensemble (Germany); and a new work for violinist Hyeyung Sol Yoon and harpist Jennifer Ellis as part of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (USA).
Perlman is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at the Yale School of Music, where his doctoral thesis won the Friedmann Thesis Prize. He holds degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (B.Mus. & M.Mus.), the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin (Artist Diploma), and undertook additional studies at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. His mentors include Christopher Theofanidis, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Jörg Widmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Yinam Leef, and Menachem Wiesenberg.
