Title: Presenze
Commission: 1986
Completed: 1986
Instrumentation: chamber ensemble
Premiere Location: New York, NY
Premiere Ensemble:
Notes: There is some confusion over the title of the piece. Olivero’s website and Aspen Programs from 1987 list the piece as Presenze, while correspondence from David Gable and a review in Newsday of the premiere list it as Presenza. No piece by the second title is listed on Olivero’s website. This might have involved a dispute over premieres. A letter from Gable to Olivero from November 3, 1986 was asking Olivero not to premiere the piece in May so that it could be premiered later that summer in Aspen (it was performed there on August 4). Perhaps the same piece was given two names to create two premiere opportunities? A program from Aspen would also say whether it was listed as a premiere.

Betty Olivero is a contemporary Israeli composer, who has lived during most of her career in Florence, Italy. She is a full professor of composition at the Music Department in Bar-Ilan University.

Betty Olivero is a winner of the most prestigious Emet Prize for Art, Science and Culture (2015), an Israeli prize awarded annually for excellence in academic and professional achievements that have far-reaching influence and make a significant contribution to society.

In 2000 Olivero was awarded the Koussevitzky Award by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and the Library of Congress, Washington USA, one of the most important international awards, given annually only to six composers.

In Olivero’s works, traditional and ethnic music materials are processed using western contemporary compositional techniques; traditional melodies and texts undergo processes of development, adaptation, transformation, assimilation, resetting and re-composition, to the point of assuming new forms in different contexts. These processes touch on wide and complex areas of contrast, such as east and west, holy and secular, traditional and new.