Oleg Felzer was born in Azerbaijan, teaching at the Baku Conservatory for many years, before coming to New York in 1988. His immersion in Mugham, the ancient Azeri “traditional professional music”, inspired him compositionally and vested his music with an improvisational nature and characteristic melodic and rhythmic gestures and new ideas of form. His merging of these traditions with advanced Western structures produced a highly original poetic language, often spare and abstract – as in his beautiful, rarefied Interrupted Song—but also on occasion (as in the case of Violin Sonata No. 1) wildly energetic. The Harp Sonata, both meditative and playful, is a major addition to the repertoire.