Ella Milch-Sheriff is one of Israel’s most frequently performed contemporary composers and the 2022 recipient of the Israel Composers and Authors Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Born in Haifa, she began composing at twelve and later earned a composition degree from the Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. Her work integrates contemporary Western techniques with Jewish, Israeli, and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

Milch-Sheriff’s fifth opera, Alma—commissioned by the Volksoper Wien and conducted by Omer Meir Wellber—premiered in Vienna in October 2024 to exceptional acclaim. Her large-scale dramatic work, The Eternal Stranger, commissioned by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig in 2020, has since been performed by major orchestras across Europe and the United States, including Teatro Massimo Palermo, the NDR Philharmonic at the Elbphilharmonie, the BBC Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, Tonhalle Zürich, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony.

Her music is widely performed in Israel—by the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and by leading orchestras and ensembles—and internationally throughout Europe and North America. She received the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize in 2005. Her first opera, And the Rat Laughed, won the Tel Aviv Rosenblum Award and has been staged across Europe and in Toronto. Subsequent operas include The Banality of Love (Staatstheater Regensburg, 2018) and Baruch’s Silence (Braunschweig, 2010), both of which have received multiple international productions.

Milch-Sheriff also composes extensively for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice. Notable recent works include her Clarinet Quartet (Berlin/Jerusalem, 2022), an orchestration of Bach’s final fugue from The Art of Fugue (Gewandhaus Leipzig, 2019), and Abschied for soprano and orchestra (Bochum Symphony and later Jerusalem, 2021). Additional orchestral commissions include NKO Tel Aviv, the Israel Camerata Jerusalem, the Ra’anana Symphonette, and the Israel Philharmonic.

She is also an accomplished film composer. Her score for Avi Nesher’s Past Life (2016), based on her family’s story, won the Lys d’Or Award in Montreal in 2017.

Milch-Sheriff’s works are published by Peters Edition, with earlier works issued by the Israel Music Institute (IMI). Ella Milch-Sheriff, Composer.