Alexander Uriah Boskovich

Alexander Uriah Boskovich was born in 1907 in Cluj-Napoca

Boskovich was born in 1907 in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary and now Cluj-Napoca in Romania. His family came from a Hungarian-Jewish background, and its name traced back to the town of Boskovice in Moravia. He attended a Jewish high school in Cluj and joined the local Jewish group Hashomer in 1920.

After high school he studied music for a year in Vienna and then in Paris. There he studied piano with Lazare Lévy and Alfred Cortot and composition with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Back in Cluj he worked as a pianist, composer and conductor, and in 1935 he founded the Goldmark Symphony Orchestra.

In 1937 he sent his work The Golden Chain, based on Jewish songs from the Carpathians, to conductor Issay Dobrowen. In 1938 the new Palestine Orchestra performed it, and Boskovich came for the premiere and settled in Tel Aviv. He later said this invitation saved his life.

In the Land of Israel his style moved away from European tonality toward sounds that imitated the oud and kanun. His Violin Concerto of 1942 won the Huberman prize, and his Oboe Concerto followed in 1943. With Oedoen Partos and Mordecai Seter he formed a group of composers known as the Troika.

In 1953 and 1956 he published a two-part Hebrew article on the ideals of Mediterranean music. After a creative silence, he returned in 1960 with Songs of Ascent and the cantata Bat Israel. He died in 1964.