Ophra Yerushalmi
Ophra Yerushalmi: "Prelude to Debussy"
Ophra bio
Ophra Yerushalmi, pianist and documentary filmmaker, studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and was later a scholarship student of Claudio Arrau and composer Stefan Wolpe.
She has performed throughout the United States, South America and Israel, as well as in London, Edinburgh, Oxford, Venice, Paris, Madrid, Krakow, Budapest, Lisbon, Munich, Dresden, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Her engagements with orchestras have included performances at the Casals Festival, with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Colombia, the Jerusalem Broadcasting Symphony and the Boston Pops.
She has premiered works of Israeli composers Paul Ben-Haim, Mordecai Seter and Joseph Tal.
New York audiences have heard her on WQXR, at the 92nd Street "Y", the Goethe Institute, Merkin Hall, the Maison Française of NYU, The Miller Theatre, Wall-to-Wall Schubert marathon at Symphony Space and The Music Festival of the Hamptons directed by Lukas Foss.
During several years as Affiliate in Music at Harvard University's Eliot House Ophra Yerushalmi developed a special way of presenting composers within the context of their own time – through music, art and literature.
Subsequent concert-programs have included:
“An Afternoon with Debussy: a Centennial Tribute to the Faun – Debussy, Dukas and Mallarmé" (Miller Theatre);
“Vienna-Paris: Arnold Schoenberg and his French Contemporaries”-- The links between Schoenberg and Ravel after World War I (The Jewish Museum);
“Transcriptions and Creative Copies in the 19th Century: Sacrilege or Interpretation?” – Franz Liszt’s Transcriptions of songs by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, with an exhibition of copies of Old Masters made by the 19th century painters Ingres and Delacroix (Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center).
The next, natural step from there were her movies:
Ophra died on February 22nd, 2017 at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, exactly one month after a visit to Paris for the first projection of her latest film: "Prelude to Debussy."