Wergo presents first recordings of chamber music works by the Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin. The eponymous series of works, Shifting Gravity, from 2008 connects the string quartets Anea Christal with the compositions Sheva and Sahaf. The second part of the CD consists of the Winter Songs III (2003).

This Wergo production shows a different side of the artist who was born in Haifa in 1957 and who, up to now, has been appreciated mainly for her stage works, in particular for the much noticed music theatre play "Pnima … Ins Innere" and her adaptation of Mozart’s "Zaïde / Adama".

The instrumental works were all created after the music-theatre plays, associating notions like paralysis, adherence, proliferation. The field of tension resulting therefrom corresponds with Czernowin's own descriptions: "Anea is the imaginary name of a 'music crystal' created from a latticework of corresponding musical gestures according to the model of an ionic crystal."

Winter Songs are described by her as follows: "The whole cycle reflects the aspect of winter which is about being pulled into the inner cave… At the same time, underneath, in the ground, the roots of life slowly grow stiff and blindly start to search for a path between the stones".

Chaya Czernowin was born on 7 December 1957 in Haifa and was brought up in Israel. She commenced studies in composition at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv and from the age of 25 has lived in Germany, Japan, the USA and Austria. Thanks to her teachers Abel Ehrlich, Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough and Roger Reynolds, and also a series of scholarships and prizes, she was able to devote herself intensely to the development of her musical language.

Czernowin’s compositions have been performed at more than forty festivals throughout the world, including the 20th Century Music Festival in Mexico, at the Wien Modern in Vienna, the Asia Pacific Triennial in Australia and in Huddersfield.