Maya Dunietz Performs Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
The composer’s beautiful piano works are brought to life, transporting us to the holy setting where the nun wrote her music.
‘Emahoy was ninety-three when I met her… She couldn’t easily get out of bed, so our conversations took place in a necessarily intimate way, with me sitting on a stool at her bedside, leaning right in so she could hear what I was saying,’ remembers Kate Molleson, author of Sound Within Sound.
Molleson visited Ethiopian pianist, composer and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou in her monastery in Jerusalem to find out more about her music. Most of her tiny chamber was taken up by an upright piano – the crucial instrument in the nun’s life.
Maya Dunietz, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, is another person who knows every corner of the composer’s room in Jerusalem. Besides being tasked with bringing her compositions to the digital age, Dunietz also looked after the nun for the final years of her 99-year-long life.
Join us for an informal evening reimagining the Purcell Room as Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s monastery chamber.
Readings and stories by Molleson from her visits to Jerusalem, interspersed with Dunietz’s playing, illuminate the composer’s fascinating life.
Performers
Maya Dunietz piano
Repertoire
Guèbrou: Works for piano to be announced
Need to know
For your visit
This event is held at the Purcell Room Southbank Centre
The Purcell Room is located in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is open from 90 minutes before events start until they finish. It’s closed at all other times.
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The Purcell Room is an auditorium located within our Queen Elizabeth Hall.
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