Michael Zev Gordon

Michael Zev Gordon was born in 1963 and studied in the UK, Italy and Holland. His works have been commissioned and performed by many leading performers worldwide, including three BBC Orchestras, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the choir of King’s College Cambridge, Hermes Ensemble, Ensemble Eutopia and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Alongside his professional work, an important, occasional strand has been to write for amateurs and children. Gordon has won the choral category of the Ivors Classical Awards twice. He has also been awarded a Prix Italia for radiophonic composition, while two portrait discs, in 2009 and 2019 – On Memory (NMC) and In the Middle of Things (Resonus) – were in The Times ‘’100 Best Albums of the Year’. Gordon has taught composition for many years in the UK and abroad; he is Professor of Composition at the University of Birmingham.

Music
Gordon’s music has been described as "a clockmaker’s craftmanship [which] somehow coincides with romantic phantasmagoria" (Sunday Times). A broad range of influences – including his teachers Holloway, Goehr, Knussen, Donatoni, Andriessen and Woolrich – have coalesced into an eclectic, individual voice, in which tradition and modernism happily rub shoulders. Memory, time and the pursuit of serenity are recurring themes. 
Major projects in the 2020s include Raising Icarus – described in the Guardian as a "high-flying chamber opera that packs a punch" – and the release of two new albums: The Impermanence of Things (NMC), featuring commissions from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and London Sinfonietta, and Diary Pieces (Resonus), an ongoing series of piano miniatures. 
2025 looks forward to Gordon’s most personal statement to date, as he reflects upon memory and the Holocaust in A Kind of Haunting, a commission for Britten Sinfonia.

Live 
A Kind of Haunting NEW WORK 2025
To be Premiered Milton Court, Barbican on 25th March
Elgar Concert Hall Birmingham 26th March
Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden 28th March
80 years after the end of WWII, A Kind of Haunting explores why and how the trauma of the Holocaust holds such a grip on both the children and grandchildren of victims and survivors.
With sung and spoken texts by poet Jacqueline Saphra, scholar Marianne Hirsch and Jewish composer Michael Zev Gordon. Gordon draws on his grandmother’s memoir, which details the final traces of his grandfather’s life before he was shot in a remote Polish forest. Why is there such an interest in re-visiting, or making present, what was lost many years before?