The Israeli Chamber Project is set to premiere Gity Razaz’s new song cycle “Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being” this April.

The piece will get its premiere at the Kaufman Music Center in New York on April 12 followed by a performance at the Bender JCC of Greater Washington on April 14, and finally a showcase at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington on April 16.

The work is scored for tenor, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, harp, and piano and features poetry and prose by Rumi and Riner Maria Rilke. Tenor Karim Sulayman headlines the performance.

“Rumi and Rilke lived about 700 years apart and on nearly opposite sides of the earth, and with completely different religious backgrounds. Yet their philosophical and imaginative perspectives on some of the most existential topics in the history of mankind are eerily similar,” said Razaz in an official press statement issued by the company. “In the poems selected for this project, I was attracted to the almost identical poetic imagery they both used in the poems which I ended up selecting for this project: they both use the imagery of ‘widening rings and circles’ to describe life and existence. Rumi calls for embracing uncertainty and living the ‘questions,’ ‘flowing down the always widening rings of being’ while Rilke acknowledges life’s unyielding truth, and moves through it with the confession that ‘I live my life in widening circles.’ . . ”

Also featured on the program are works by Schumann, Barber, Naji Hakim, Debussy, and Zohar Sharon.