Skip to main content

Night in Galicia

Here's an unusual album. Russian composer Vladimir Martynov was inspired by a poem by the Soviet futurist writer Velimir Khlebnikov to come up with a suite of songs and instrumental interludes bringing together the talents of a classical string ensemble (the Ensemble OPUS POSTH., led by violinist Tatiana Grindenko, who I believe is or was Martynov's wife), and a vocal folk group, the Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble. I think I may have ordered the CD directly from the German label that issued it. I'd heard a piece of Martynov's on an album called Silencio, featuring Gidon Kremer (Tatiana Grindenko's ex-husband) and his ensemble, which led me down this particular rabbit-hole.

Night in Galicia - the poem - was apparently based on traditional songs collected in the 19th Century in which "river-maidens, wood-goblins, the wind and other nocturnal creatures show us the laws of their rituals". According to Pokrovsky, they are "a window into the Russian soul". Khlebnikov seems to have been striving to conjure up a sense of primordial folklore. This clearly is all set in the Polish/Ukrainian Galicia, not the Spanish one.

The pieces on the album certainly have a rough-hewn quality with sour harmonies and sawing strings, The opening number, glorying in the title 'A-A-A O-O-O EH-EH-EH EE-EE-EE OO-OO-OO' begins uncompromisingly with chanted vowel sounds which at length come together into acapella song, the strings only joining at the ten-minute mark. Subsequent tracks have titles such as 'Your lips are the black grouse's brow', 'Ever these shades draw me in' and 'Wind, you hear, this deed is frightful!'.


 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...