Stella Lerner
Stella Lerner is a unique and fascinating voice in 21st-century Israeli art music. Lerner is especially renowned as a preeminent figure in contemporary Israeli art song, celebrated for her profound and sensitive settings of modern Hebrew poetry. Her compositions have been performed and recorded by Israel’s finest artists, receiving critical praise and captivating audiences in Lieder recitals, chamber-music concerts and prestigious festivals, some of them dedicated specifically to her music, in Israel, Britain, Germany, Austria, Lithuania and the United States. Her oeuvre spans various genres, including jazz standards, Jewish liturgical music (for choirs and chamber groups alike), and musical ‘melodramas’ for actress and piano.
Her works serve form a regular part of the performance curriculum at vocal departments at music academies and vocal competitions in Israel and abroad. They are broadcast frequently on Israeli classical radio, and receive critical acclaim. Orchestrations of her songs have been commissioned for the opening of the 2014 Israeli Music Celebration, and performed alongside works by Bartok and Mahler as part of the Symphonic Series of the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion (2025).
In 2018, Oxford University dedicated a special event to Lerner’s music as part of the Oxford Song Network. This included a recital of Lerner’s Leah Goldberg settings (featuring soprano Sharon Rostorf-Zamir and pianist Marc Verter) and an academic symposium with scholars in literature, music and translation. The event focused on Lerner’s daringly unique musical interpretation of Goldberg’s poetry, and on the exceptional synthesis of European traditions, universal message and distinctly Jewish and Israeli traits that characterizes composer and poet alike. The unique, profound dialogue between Lerner’s music and Goldberg’s poetry was also the focal point of several recitals and festive events in Lithuania (2019-2023). These culminated in a special recital of Lerner’s Goldberg Lieder at the XVI Music Festival (2024), initiated and performed by the soprano Asta Kriksciunaite, aiming to return the poet’s legacy to her birth country. Lerner’s music also featured prominently at the KOL – Jüdische Musik festival in Germany (2018) and at the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria (2023).
In Israel, her music featured prominently at Israeli Music Celebration (2012, 2014); the Women Composers’ Forum festival, Vox Feminae (2016, 2018, 2019); at the recital “Between Mahler and Other Expressionists” (Upper Galilee Chamber Music Festival, Kfar Blum, 2022); and in a special joint recital with the late composer and pianist Eyal Bat at Poem Ba-lev, a concert series dedicated to Israeli chamber music (2024), which was also broadcast on Kan Kol Ha-Muzika. Her work The Scroll of Aharon for soprano and piano trio was commissioned especially for a concert in memory of the late linguist Prof. Aharon Dolgopolsky (2019). In 2025, premieres for two of her orchestral songs opened a concert featuring soprano Alla Vasilevitsky and conducted by George Pehlivinian.
Many of Lerner’s songs have been published by the Israel Music Institute (IMI), some with singable translations allowing them to be performed in English as well as in the original Hebrew. Two full-length albums of her music were also issued by IMI: Stella Lerner: Poetic Songs (2016), showcasing a selection of her Hebrew Lieder, sung by Sharon Rostorf-Zamir, with pianists Hagai Yodan and Victor Stanislavsky, and other musicians; and If I Were Music (2024) – a selection of her melodramas featuring the actress Michal Bat-Adam and pianist/singer Hagai Yodan.
In addition to her artistic activity, Lerner developed a unique method of music therapy, based on the creation of “musical portraits” that express the patient’s unique emotional world. This method has been recognized in academic forums and conferences, and was formed the focal point of Dr Rivka Elkoshi’s extensive research project “Portrait Song in Music therapy: Stella Lerner’s Song-based Approach”, published in Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy (2021).