The Azrieli Music, Arts and Culture Centre Announces 2028 Azrieli Music Prizes Laureates

The Azrieli Music, Arts and Culture Centre Announces 2028 Azrieli Music Prizes Laureates

Luis Arias, Linda Bouchard, Sharon Azrieli, Mathew Rosenblum (Credit: Danylo Bobyk)

Montréal, QC, November 3, 2026 – Today, the Azrieli Music, Arts and Culture Centre (AMACC) named three outstanding composers as the 2028 Azrieli Music Prizes (AMP) Laureates. Created in 2014 by Sharon Azrieli, C.Q., D.Mus for the Azrieli Foundation, the biennial Azrieli Music Prizes identify and support composers of distinction, giving them the resources, platform and reach to create music of enduring value.

Congratulations to Luis Arias, who won the Azrieli Commission for International Music; Linda Bouchard, who was awarded the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music; and Mathew Rosenblum, who received the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music. Each AMP competition cycle focuses on a specific instrumentation category; the 2028 works will be composed for a chamber ensemble of up to 15 musicians with optional soloists.

“We are delighted to welcome Luis Arias, Linda Bouchard and Mathew Rosenblum to the Azrieli Music Prizes family,” said Sharon Azrieli,. “Each of these exceptional composers offers a fresh perspective on their respective Prize theme. I am eager to see their creative vision realized by our esteemed Montréal performance partner, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and on many of the world’s great stages in the future.”

Offering the most substantial awards of its kind in Canada, AMP has become one of the most significant composition competitions in the world. Each laureate receives a prize package valued at over CAD 250,000, including a cash award of CAD 50,000; a performance of their work by the Prizes’ Performance Partner, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Le NEM), at the AMP Gala Concert in Autumn 2028; two subsequent international performances; and a commercial studio recording of their prize-winning work, also featuring Le NEM.

“Over the past 30 years, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne has been committed to championing contemporary creation, resulting in nearly 300 premieres to date,” said Jean-Michaël Lavoie, Artistic and Music Director of Le NEM. “We are proud to once again collaborate with the Azrieli Music Prizes to bring three exceptional new chamber compositions to life on stage and expand the global contemporary repertoire.”

This year, three distinguished juries — consisting of composers, musicologists, musicians, conductors and producers — selected the winning submissions. The juries included Barbara Assiginaak C.M. O.Ont, Lera Auerbach, Ofer Ben Amots, Johannes Debus, Margareta Ferek-Petric, Jonathan Goldman, Daniel Kidane, Jennifer Koh, Jean-Michaël Lavoie, Steven Mercurio, Samy Moussa, Sarah Nemtsov, Colleen Renihan, Pierre Rigaudière, André Ristic, Assaf Shelleg, Ana Sokolovic, Ilana Webster-Kogen, Na'ama Zisser and past AMP Laureates Brian Current, Avner Dorman and Kelly-Marie Murphy.

As AMP looks ahead, its Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music is being reimagined to more effectively address the recovery of significant Jewish works that have been lost, overlooked or historically suppressed, particularly those connected to the Holocaust. A discovery prize honouring an existing work of Jewish music, the Prize was previously awarded alongside AMP’s three commissions. This renewed approach will strengthen the Prize and bring it closer to its founding purpose. Prize details will be announced in early 2027.

ABOUT THE LAUREATES AND THEIR WORKS

Mathew Rosenblum — Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music

The Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music is awarded to encourage composers to creatively and critically engage with the question, “What is Jewish music?” It is given to the composer who displays the utmost creativity, artistry, technical mastery and professional expertise in their response to this question.

The 2028 Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music has been awarded to Mathew Rosenblum for his proposed work Tamim (Simplicity), a 15-minute chamber work to be scored for mezzo-soprano soloist, re-tuned instruments, chamber ensemble, and pre-recorded audio featuring the composer’s grandmother singing traditional Yiddish and Ukrainian folk melodies. The composition will interweave these archival vocal recordings into a microtonally inflected ensemble texture, using live vocal shadowing and specialized tuning to highlight the texture and grain of the recorded voice. Grounded in personal family history, the work will offer a musical reflection on memory, simplicity, and joy within a complex world.

Mathew Rosenblum’s works have been performed by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and many others, and appear on the MODE, New World Records, New Focus Recordings and BMOP/sound labels. His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Fromm Foundation Commissions, a National Endowment for the Arts Music Fellowship Grant and a Barlow Endowment Commission. Using a variety of tuning systems, his work does not live within traditional boundaries, creating a compellingly fresh landscape.

Linda Bouchard — Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music

The Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music is offered to a Canadian composer to create a new musical work that engages with the complexities of composing in Canada today. 2028 Laureate Linda Bouchard’s proposed work, Le Saguenay, Saki-nip, will be a 15-minute continuous composition scored for a 15-player instrumental ensemble. The work will paint a portrait of the majestic Saguenay Fjords, the composer’s own family history in the region, and a crucial period in the history of French Canada. Inspired by early encounters between Innu communities and French explorers, expansive ensemble textures and intimate contrapuntal string dialogues will sonically connect the past and the present, and the personal with the universal.

During Linda Bouchard’s fifty-year musical career, she has been a composer, conductor, orchestrator, producer, researcher and mentor. She has spent her professional life between New York, California and Canada, but always returning to Montréal as her home port. Her works have been recorded by the CBC, Analekta, ECM and Bang on a Can, among others. Bouchard is the recipient of the Composer of the Year Award from the Conseil québécois de la musique, and she has served as composer-in-residence with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa.

Luis Arias — Azrieli Commission for International Music

The Azrieli Commission for International Music is awarded to a composer who engages deeply in exploring cultural expression that has a meaningful connection to their lived experience. This year, the jury awarded the Commission to Luis Arias for his proposed work Optimized for Loneliness.

Optimized for Loneliness will be a 12-minute work scored for a 15-player mixed chamber ensemble and fixed media that reflects on how contemporary digital mediation transforms the perception and memory of traditional Andalusian Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions. The piece will explore how traditional street rituals are experienced today through digital screens, where shared community traditions become fragmented online clips. Without using direct musical quotations, the work will blend electronic sound into the live ensemble to shift back and forth between loud, chaotic energy and fragile, quiet solitude.

Luis Arias is a Spanish composer born in Granada and currently based in Madrid. He has worked with orchestras and ensembles such as the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Venezuelan National Symphony Orchestra, United Instruments of Lucilin ensemble (Luxembourg), Tonkünstler Orchestra (Austria) and Doelen Ensemble (Netherlands). His 2022 work Hyperconnected Fragmentations was written for Tanglewood Music Center, where he was a Composition Fellow. In that same year, he won first prize at the XXXIII SGAE-CNDM Young Composer Spanish Awards with his work Arya.

About the Azrieli Music Prizes 

Created in 2014 by Sharon Azrieli C.Q., D.Mus for the Azrieli Foundation, the biennial Azrieli Music Prizes (AMP) identify and support composers of distinction, giving them the resources, platform and reach to create music of enduring value. Open to the international music community, AMP accepts nominations for works from individuals and institutions of all ages, nationalities, faiths and genders, which are then submitted to its expert juries through an open call for scores and proposals. 

The AMP prize package — now valued at over CAD 250,000 per laureate — makes it the top music composition competition in Canada and one of the largest in the world. Past and current Azrieli Music Prizes Laureates are Luis Arias, Linda Bouchard and Mathew Rosenblum (2028); Hana Ajiashvili, Nicholas Denton Protsack, Adrian Mocanu and Dalit Hadass Warshaw (2026); Josef Bardanashvili, Yair Klartag, Jordan Nobles and Juan Trigos (2024); Iman Habibi, Aharon Harlap and Rita Ueda (2022); Keiko Devaux, Yotam Haber and Yitzhak Yedid (2020); Avner Dorman and Kelly-Marie Murphy (2018); and Brian Current and Wlad Marhulets (2016).