The Azrieli Music, Arts and Culture Centre has announced four composers as the 2026 Azrieli Music Prizes Laureates. Hana Ajiashvili  won the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music; Dalit Hadass Warshaw received the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music; Nicholas Denton Protsack was awarded the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music; and Adrian Mocanu, won the Azrieli Commission for International Music.

The Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music is awarded to Georgian-Israeli composer for her 2022 work Riddle, which transforms poet Yehuda Halevi’s medieval verse into a powerful meditation on persecution and resilience.

American composer, pianist and thereminist Dalit Hadass Warshaw won the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music. Her work Letter From Across the River tells the true story of her great-grandfather in war-torn Poland, who swam across the Bug River to send a farewell letter before returning to face his fate with his family. A former composition faculty member at the Boston Conservatory and Juilliard, she currently teaches at the Mannes School of Music and Brooklyn College (CUNY).

The Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music is offered to the New Zealand–based Canadian composer Nicholas Denton Protsack for his proposed work Height of Land, for orchestra, chorus and solo cello, in which he reimagines what it means to write Canadian music through the lens of environmental listening and renewal. The work will invite listeners into a sound world where land, water and voice converge in a living, breathing musical ecosystem.

The Azrieli Commission for International Music is offered to a composer who engages deeply in an interplay of cultures meaningful to their lived experience. 2026 laureate, Romanian-Ukrainian composer Adrian Mocanu proposed the work ‘de l’encra escafada’ (from faded ink), that will resurrect the lost voices of the trobairitz – the female troubadours of medieval Provence – through complex choral textures and the haunting sonority of four violas da gamba. Inspired by the lone surviving song of Beatriz de Dia, the work will become an act of musical reclamation, where fragments of forgotten language and melody reassemble into living echoes of the past.

Adrian Mocanu has received international recognition through awards such as the Frederic Mompou International Award (2017), the Borys Lyatoshynsky Composition Competition (2021) and the Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition (2022).