MONK Basket Rondo. SALZMAN Jukebox in the Tavern of Love • Western Wind Voc Ens • LABOR 7094 (47:44 Text and Translation)


This disc pairs a commissioned work by Meredith Monk, one of the few pieces she did not write for her own vocal ensemble first, with a similarly unusual piece by Western Wind’s director, Eric Salzman. The result is one of the oddest yet most refreshing discs I’ve heard in years, particularly since this Monk piece is one of her real gems.


For those unfamiliar with Monk’s work, she writes wordless, polyphonic, rhythmic fantasias for voices, using syllabic sounds to color and emphasize the rhythm (open vowels for long-held notes, consonants for syncopated passages). Her masterpiece, to date, is her two-hour opera Atlas, but Basket Rondo is certainly one of her most fascinating and engaging pieces. I was fascinated by Salzman’s description in the liner notes how Basket Rondo came together as a piece and a performance: “she gave thematic material—orally or on tape—to the members of the group and then guided them in improvisation based on this material. After each session, Monk spent time alone composing new material and refining the overall form. The piece was constantly changing, sometimes substantially at each meeting….The entire process … had more in common with the creation and evolution of a jazz composition or a piece of choreography.” There are some unusual vocal effects in Basket Rondo that I don’t recall hearing even in most of Monk’s previous work. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the fade-out ending. Even in jazz performances, I consider fade-out endings to be a bit of a cop-out.


Jukebox in the Tavern of Love begins with a strange narration about an attractive nun (Sister Sorella) singing a “Dies irae,” then goes into a description of the strange characters who come into the bar. The vocal music has words (written by Valeria Vasilevski), but since most of them are sung by a hooty countertenor, not all of them are understandable. But the music is a lot of fun to listen to, based somewhat on Monk’s aesthetic, somewhat on polyphonic madrigals, but all of it constantly evolving and morphing. After the nun, there follows first a dancer singing nonsense lyrics in a peculiar rhythm, then a tune titled “When I romp with my baby tonight” that begins as a solo but becomes a fugue when other voices enter one at a time. Weird stuff, but good weird stuff! Next comes the song of a rabbi, “Do you know what a DP (displaced person) is?” This, too, evolves into its own polyphony as he describes how he wanted to become a Jesuit priest: “You can’t; you’re Jewish … a Jewish Jesuit will never do!” The nun then tells the story of her late aunt, who left her a pile of love letters and a confession that she was a lesbian. The poet sings a toast to love in all its forms, then a four-part madrigal (led by the rabbi) on the words “Salute amore” before the Con Ed worker (Consolidated Edison, the New York power and light company, for those who may need a translator) drinks and sings a toast to love: “Wine is the balm of lovers, come pour a cup for me….Awaken, lovers, listen!” It’s a wonderful, enchanting piece, difficult to put into words. You really have to hear it to appreciate it.


This is, so far, my Best New Record of 2014. Get it!


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

A Sonogram is a graphic representation of a sound from the physical world that cannot be represented in conventional musical notation. This new release of music from Central and Eastern Europe takes traditional instruments and, with the aid of non-traditional musical notation, evokes a post-modern musical world of introspection, numerology, and mysticism. Eastern Europeans led by Yannis Xenakis whose legendary Evryali is realized here in a dynamic virtuoso performance by the Bulgarian pianist Angela Tosheva.

Savage Nightingale

ENGLISH SUITES 1-3 CHROMATIC

Stadler: Brains on Fire

ARNAOUDOV The Way of the Birds • Tanya Kazandjieva-Chauche (sop); Ens • LABOR LAB7068 (42:33 Text and Translation)


Oh, goody, this month it’s me who gets the album of Minimalist-Bulgarian-contemporary-dance-scores-based-on-medieval-Bulgarian-literature to review. But my sarcasm dissipated pretty quickly on first listen. Born in 1957, the literary minded Gheorghi Arnaoudov has written a number of chamber, symphonic, and stage compositions, often taking his inspiration from ancient Bulgarian and Orphic texts, and we have here a collection of four tone poems, all written in the 1990s, stemming from his collaboration with choreographer Mila Iskrenova.


Confusingly listed as “three large fragments from Gheorghi Arnaoudov’s cycle of three poems” (are these fragments or the complete cycle?), The Way of the Birds I, II, and III is a sparsely written, harmonically complex set of pieces for soprano and chamber ensemble based on medieval Bulgarian love poems. It is a very earthy, tribal start, with the tense, sustained violin line creating an uneasy, parched landscape for the solo flute’s soulful but increasingly manic writing, a lone sign of life in this trancelike environment. If Way of the Birds I acts like some primal beginning, Arnaoudov skillfully builds the second part into a soaring climax, full of taught, percussive rhythms and effects. It is here that we finally get to hear Tanya Kazandjieva-Chauche’s flexible, expressive voice up close, in duet (dubbed with herself, maybe), and then with much higher writing in the third part, arguably the most melodic of the cycle. Here the beautiful vocal motif is set to the brutal percussion rhythms and the first section’s open strings, creating a deft completion and summary of everything that has gone on before.


With Footnote , Arnaoudov creates a much fuller sound picture for his realization of James Joyces’s erotic, unsettling A Prayer , from his collection Pomes Penyeach . The closely miked Sprechgesang part is brilliantly dramatized by Kazandjieva-Chauche, a frightening take on the carnal and disturbing imagery of Joyce’s poem. Alluring and menacing at once, it is a vivid, dramatic work, gradually paring down its orchestration to end on just voice and guitar. The allusion to Tristan und Isolde is less obvious, although it’s a good fit to the poetic imagery of love and death. More perplexing still are the use of instruments on this album. Although not listed, there is definitely the use of brass and guitar in Footnote , as well as the uncredited vocal dueting. It would be interesting to see how this has been scored, with its very unusual effects, as I feel the list of performers is not quite complete.


The various echoing and whispering effects have been well handled on the recording, which is clear and sensibly balanced, and the notes, in rather florid and misspelled English, give valuable context. Good thing too, for although we get the poems printed in their original script, no one has a stab at translating the “virtually untranslatable” Middle Bulgarian texts, leaving the non-Middle Bulgarian clientele hanging somewhat. A genuinely surprising and beautiful disc, nonetheless.


FANFARE: Barnaby Rayfield

MUSIC OF TRIBUTE—J. S. BACH • Beatrice Berthold (pn) • LABOR 7079 (76:44)


BACH Preludes: in e, BWV 941; in C, BWV 939; in c, BWV 999. Fugue in C, BWV 953. Little Preludes: in F, BWV 927; in C, BWV 924; in D, BWV 925. Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 874. Italian Concerto, BWV 971. DUTILLEUX Au gré des ondes: Hommage à Bach. HONEGGER Prelude, Arioso, and Fughetta on the Name of Bach. GODOWSKY Prelude and Fugue (B.A.C.H.). VILLA-LOBOS Bachianas brasileiras No. 4. POULENC Valse-improvisation on the Name of Bach. BARTÓK Mikrokosmos III: Hommage à J. S. B. KURTÁG Games, Vol. 3: Hommage à J. S. B. RILEY G Song. SHOSTAKOVICH Prelude and Fugue No. 24 in d


This is volume five in a series from Labor Records that juxtaposes the music of the “tribute” dedicatee (here J. S. Bach) with music that purports to be related by theme or other sort of dedication. The previous first three volumes have all been covered in Fanfare , to favorable comments: Villa-Lobos (25:4), Debussy (25:5), and Fauré (28:5). The fourth volume, dedicated to Scarlatti, apparently missed these pages. Each features a different pianist and a slightly different concept as to what constitutes a tribute.


In this case, we have a number of pieces by Bach that, strangely enough, might not actually be by the composer, which might make the premise a little shaky. Be that as it may (and the questionable works will always be by Bach to me), it is remarkable how well this music melds with the others, all from the 20th century. But Dutilleux’s “Hommage à Bach” from Au gré des onde seems to be lifted directly from the last bars of the proceeding Prelude in E Minor, and even composers as disparate as Bartók, Kurtág (whose nine-second homage offers little more than a skipped heartbeat), and Terry Riley, coming three-in-a-row, fit as naturally between the Preludes in C and D as ham and cheese on rye.


Of the meatier pieces here, I should mention that Berthold’s Italian Concerto is about as fine as I hope to hear, her Bachianas brasileiras No. 4 stunning in its rhythmic elasticity, and the one Shostakovich Prelude completely in the spirit of the Russian master’s love of polyphony. Her piano sounds warm and vibrant in its concert-hall acoustic, and I found this mix-and-match to be wonderfully entertaining and enlightening if not overly profound in meaning. A fine hour and change delightfully spent awaits you.


FANFARE: Steven E. Ritter

MUSIC OF TRIBUTE, Volume 6 • Ieva Jokubaviciute, Vladimir Valjarevi? (pn 1 ); Marjorie Dix (mez 2 ) • LABOR 7086 (60:50 Text and Translation)


BERG Piano Sonata. 2 4 Songs, op. 2. SCELSI Passage du poète. ALI-ZADEH Piano Sonata No. 1. FINNEY Variations on a Theme by Alban Berg. GILBOA Reflections on 3 Chords of Alban Berg. APOSTEL 1 Variations from Berg’s Opera Lulu


Following the scheme of its predecessors (see Fanfare 25:4, 25:5, 28:5, 32:3), this CD, the latest installment in Labor Records’ Music of Tribute series, interleaves music by Berg and compositions written in his memory. In this case, at least, the result is an evocative sense of aesthetic and temporal dislocation. This stems, in part, from Berg’s ambiguous position as both a progressive modernist and a backward-looking late Romantic, a duality that allows his followers to draw opposite kinds of inspiration from his music. Thus, for instance, the tonally unmoored Reflections by Jacob Gilboa (1920–2007) takes the forward-looking aspects of the second scene of Wozzeck as its starting point; Scelsi’s redolent Passage du poète , in contrast, looks back on early Berg, especially the Sonata, as if through a fog of nostalgia. (Christopher Zimmerman’s notes insist that there are no actual quotes, but I suspect I won’t be the only listener to hear fairly direct references.) But the vertigo has another source as well: Berg’s Violin Concerto was, of course, itself a memorial to Manon Gropius; and by choosing the opening of that work as the source of his eloquent Variations, Ross Lee Finney opens up a kind of mise-en-abyme that looks back all the way to the incestuous world of turn-of-the-century Vienna. In the end, listening to this disc hauntingly dissolves your sense of stability.


The performances are all excellent. Ieva Jokubaviciute, making her recording debut, fuses a solid technique (listen, for example, to the clockwork counterpoint in the last movement of the Ali-Zadeh Sonata) with a luminous touch and a strong lyrical impulse. On the whole, the performances tend to be on the gentle side, more interested in nuances of color and phrasing than in accumulation of sheer weight. Thus, the Berg Sonata is set out with unusually suggestive flexibility that plays up the music’s meditative qualities rather than its emotional heat—it’s not exactly an introverted performance (it’s too open-hearted for that), but it’s never insistent. And while some of the grander moments on the recital are consequently played down, the gain in eloquence more than compensates. Marjorie Dix, blessed with a marvelously rich voice that’s just right for the op. 2 songs, matches Jokubaviciute’s expressivity.


Any flaws? Well, I wouldn’t have ended with Hans Erich Apostel’s rather workaday four-hand transcription of the Lulu Variations—especially since the music itself makes little sense outside its context (ideally the whole opera, but minimally the suite), where its very banality serves, dramatically, to provide a perverse kind of respite. In addition, there are no texts for the songs. Other than that, this well-engineered disc is warmly recommended. More from Jokubaviciute would be welcome.


FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz

Classic German cabaret music from the 20's, 30's & 40's."Sylvia Anders is a consistently compelling, protean, sensuously and satirically powerful interpreter of both the words and the sinuous musical lines. She is a German actress but, singing in English, is doubly idiomatic. Because the songs are so skillfully theatrical, they transcend their grim topical origins - especially when sung, as here, with such voracious mockery. A remarkable album." ÑNat Hentoff, The Progressive

Interesting and entertaining.


This is a delightful disk of unpretentious, enjoyable and well played music without problems intellectually. It will stand repeated hearings. What’s more there’s less well known composers mixed in with big names such as Gershwin and Brouwer.


Mangoré was one of the first guitarists to make gramophone records in 1909 and 1910, but not the first as John Williams claims. He was a superb guitarist and his understanding of the instrument can be heard in the two miniatures which are charming and relaxed pieces. Born in Paraguay Barrios is regarded by many as one of the greatest musicians of all time. It’s easy to see why with such lovely pieces as these.


Falú is Argentinean, and a guitarist whose style is colourful and unassuming. His works are very similar in approach and have a relaxed feel to them. Leo Brouwer is well enough known these days as a composer for the guitar – indeed, Naxos is recording his complete solo works for the instrument. His two movement Rito de los Orish ás is a serious work, full of atmosphere and rhythm, with more complex music in the second of the pieces.


Despite writing a vast amount of music - there are 12 Symphonies and 17 string quartets amongst many other things – Villa-Lobos is best remembered today for his music for guitar. It is justly regarded as some of the most important music for the instrument from the earlier part of the 20^th century. These two pieces, from his 12 Etudes, are quite lovely – passionate and without overt display. They make me wish we’d had more of them on this disk – but what would you have had to discard to make room for them? I hope that Ferná ndez might be persuaded to record them all in the future.


Montana is another guitarist, Colombian-born. His Columbian Suite consists of four delightful yet modest movements which are pleasing but lack the charm of some of the other works presented here. But don’t let that worry you for it is most enjoyable. The Tunisian Dyens studied guitar with the Spanish master Alberto Ponce. Saudade No.3 is an impressive work and he packs a lot into a short time-span. In several sections, Dyens mixes the serious with the lighter and creates a fascinating composition full of interest and incident. This is a real highlight.


I’ve left the arrangements for last; they are all skillfully done and expertly performed. Eleanor Rigby starts with an elegiac, and truly heart-breaking, introduction until the song itself is given in a fast tempo. Blackbird is a simpler arrangement. Fascinatin’ Rhythm has a beautifully atmospheric introduction and then there’s a great race at the tune! So much of Ginastera’s music fits so easily onto the guitar that it’s sometimes hard to realise that a lot of it isn’t original guitar music! Zamba and Gato are the third and fifth pieces from his Cinco canciones populares argentinas for voice and piano.


 


An interesting and entertaining disk well worth exploring.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

Labor Records presents an album that pays tribute to one of the last giants of Country Blues whose passing ended that illustrious period of raw-boned, original talent. This is the first release of tracks originally recorded in the mid-70s, featuring Louisiana Red in the most pure and unadulterated period of his career. Also featured is the rarely recorded guitar wizard Lefty Dizz as well as Peg Leg Sam, the astounding harmonica player whose skills were developed during his years as a wandering hobo.

SAHL-SALZMAN Civilization and Its Discontents • Karl Patrick Krause ( Carlos Arachnid ); Candice Earley ( Jill Goodheart ); William Parry ( Derek Dude ); Paul Binotto ( Jeremy Jive ); Michael Sahl (pn, org); Cleve Pozar (dr, perc) • LABOR LAB 7089 (44: 21)


Here’s a blast from the past. Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman’s collaborative opera (words and music by both) was recorded by Nonesuch in 1978, and, as far as I know, has not appeared on CD until now. The question is, why now , or even why now? (The booklet notes mention an apparently isolated 1999 production in Amsterdam, but I think it has lain dormant since then.) References to Patti Smith are not the only thing that makes Civilization dated. The characters speak hip psychobabble that pseudo-intellectuals engaged in during the 1970s, usually moments before they signed you up for Erhard Seminars Training. Indeed, the (admittedly ironic) refrain of this opera’s first scene is “If it feels good, do it!”


The creators’ lengthy booklet note, reproduced from the Nonesuch LP, anatomizes opera as an art form, but that’s beside the point. (There was an air of trying too hard about this work from the get-go, and that certainly has not been mitigated this time around.) Civilization is a theater piece that works very well on the radio, in your home, or in your car. It opens and closes in the Club Bide-a-Wee, in New York, where we meet Jill, Derek, and Jeremy. They spout trite clichés straight out of Psychology Today (yesterday) and air their insecurities. In the long middle scene, Jill, an aspiring singer/actress, takes Jeremy back to her apartment, but their would-be hookup is interrupted by telephone calls and by the reappearance of her roommate and boyfriend, Derek, with whom she had quarreled earlier. Instead of fighting each other, Derek and Jeremy (an agent who represents a woman dressed as a singing chicken) close a business deal, and Jill, frustrated by their lack of machismo (her word, not mine!), attempts to kill herself with an electric kitchen knife she had received in the mail from her mother. Deus ex machina Carlos Arachnid arrives in the nick of time to put everyone back on track by giving each of them a special word. In the final scene, we are back in the club. Jill, Derek, and Jeremy seem to have found peace, although it’s really just a variation of the first scene’s psychobabble. They were self-centered and annoying when we met them, and they remain that way as we leave them.


The more I listen to Civilization , the less I am sure what point Sahl and Salzman are trying to make. Just what (or who) is being satirized here? I think the deepest thing one can say about Civilization is the recursive statement, “Shallow people are shallow.” Maybe I am taking it too seriously! I find it highly entertaining, albeit in a repellent way. The music, in a variety of styles, but definitely tending more toward musical theater than opera, gets deeply into your head. So does much of the text. Civilization is an arch work that might have been composed by cynical psychology grad students, after having overdosed on commercial jingles.


With the exception of William Parry, this is the opera’s original cast. Only Karl Patrick Krause (who died in 2008) was an operatic singer, although his is the least attractive voice. The quality of the voices almost doesn’t matter, though, as what matters far more is the cast’s acting ability. Everyone works hard to put across Sahl and Salzman’s sarcastic rant against … well, against something . (The stars of Seinfeld could have performed this opera.) To be honest, they succeed. Furthermore, every single word of the text can be understood. (The claustrophobic engineering assists with that.)


Civilization and Its Discontents is too clever for its own good, maybe, and it plucks awfully low-hanging fruit, but I keep coming back to it, and that must mean something.


FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

MUSIC OF TRIBUTE—HAYDN • Javor Bra?i? (pn) • LABOR 7088 (64:29)


HAYDN Piano Sonatas: in D, Hob XVI:42; in G, Hob XVI:40; in C , XVI:50. HAHN Theme and Variations on Haydn’s Name. RAVEL Minuet. D’INDY Minuet on Haydn’s Name. DEBUSSY Hommage à Haydn. D. KEMPF Sonatine, “Hommage à Haydn.” G. BENJAMIN Meditation on Haydn’s Name. DUKAS Prélude Élégiaque. HOCHSTEIN Capricietto, “A ‘Sauschneider’ Sketch”


Here is Volume 7 in a fascinating series of discs dedicated to presenting works written in tribute to various composers either by their close contemporaries or by their latter-day counterparts. It’s the first release in this series to come to my attention, but I see from the Fanfare Archive that three earlier volumes were reviewed in previous issues. James Miller covered Volume 1, a Villa-Lobos tribute, in 25:4; Peter Burwasser, Volume 2, a tribute to Debussy, in 25:5; and Steven E. Ritter, Volume 5, a Bach tribute, in 32:3. Volumes 3, 4, and 6 do not appear to have been reviewed, but for the curious, they are tributes to Fauré, Scarlatti, and Berg.


I must admit that when I think of references to Haydn in other composers’ works, the most obvious one that comes to mind is Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn; ironically, as we now know, the theme Brahms thought was by Haydn turned out to be by someone else, most likely Pleyel. Nor would I have imagined that so many composers paid tribute to Haydn by writing works based on the letters of his name or by composing pieces that take their cue from Haydn’s style or an actual musical quote from one of his works.


There’s so much that’s intriguing about this disc, I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps the logical place is with the musical substitution cipher that represents Haydn’s name. Everyone knows the Bach cipher: B = B?, A = A, C = C, H = B?. That one’s easy, as are similar ones used by Schumann and Shostakovich. Technically, it’s not even a substitution cipher, for the letters representing the musical notes B?-A-C-B? actually spell B-A-C-H in German. The Haydn conversion, however, is truly a substitution cipher, apparently a secret code that has yet to be cracked—someone, call the CIA.


The musical representation of “HAYDN” is B-A-D-D-G. The first two letters are easily accounted for, as is the fourth letter: the H, as we already know, is B?, the A is A, and the second D is D. But no one seems to know how the first D and the final G came to represent the letters Y and N. And yet, this cipher has apparently been around since at least 1909 when Jules Écorcheville, the French musicologist and editor and publisher of the Révue musicale de la Société , commissioned a number of composers to write piano pieces based on the B-A-D-D-G motive in commemoration of the centenary of Haydn’s death. The reason this is significant is that of the six French composers Écorcheville commissioned, five of them—Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, D’Indy, and Hahn—are represented on this disc by the B-A-D-D-G pieces they wrote.


Not to be outdone by the French, in 1982, the BBC commissioned six British composers to do the same thing to mark the 250th anniversary of Haydn’s birth. One of those composers, George Benjamin, is likewise represented on the disc by his B-A-D-D-G piece, Meditation on Haydn’s Name.


That leaves composer Davorin Kempf (b.1947) and composer Wolfgang Hochstein (b.1959). Just a few issues back, I reviewed a CD of works by Croat composer Dora Peja?evi?, noting that before receiving that release I couldn’t have named a single Croatian composer. Well now, with Kempf, I can name two. His Sonatine, subtitled, “Hommage à Haydn,” is not only the most modernistic piece on the disc but the one that’s least linked to Haydn in any discernible way. It’s not based on the Haydn name cipher or on a quoted theme from any of his works.


Perhaps the best way to describe the tenuous connection is to say that Kempf’s Sonatine is to Haydn what Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony is to Haydn and Mozart, though even that analogy requires a stretch of the imagination. Prokofiev may have introduced melodic and harmonic elements into his piece that would have cocked 18th-century wigs askew, but one recognizes in it the general outlines, contours, and mock style of a Classical symphony. It’s hard to make a similar claim for Kempf’s Sonatine. One is not likely to hear in it anything other than an extremely modern, atonal work filled with tone clusters and percussive keyboard effects.


To the extent that there’s any Haydn association it’s to be found in the formal aspects of the piece and its claimed tonal relationships. The first movement, so Eric Salzman’s program notes tell us, is an actual sonata-allegro form in which a first theme in C modulates to a second theme in the dominant, G, and then restates the second theme in the tonic, C, in the recapitulation. That may well be, but without reference to the score, and absent perfect pitch, it’s impossible to hear this in such a disorienting melee of notes. Besides, even if you could hear it, sonata-allegro form was neither Haydn’s sole property nor the fundamental feature that defined his style and made his music sound different from, say, that of Beethoven, who also wrote in sonata-allegro form. Taken on its own, Kempf’s piece may grow on the listener with repeated hearings, but insofar as the “Haydn” motif of this disc is concerned, Kempf’s Sonatine has little cred.


Finally, we come to Wolfgang Hochstein, a German composer, organist, conductor, and musicologist based in Hamburg and specializing in the music of the 18th century. His Capricietto , “A ‘Sauschneider’ Sketch,” is the one piece on the disc that draws upon an actual musical quote from one of Haydn’s works, namely, the Capriccio in G Major, Hob XVII:1, which in turn quoted a vulgar Viennese drinking song of the period, Acht Sauschneider müssen seyn , which roughly translates as “It takes eight men to castrate a boar.” Hochstein’s Capricietto lasts only four minutes, but it will have you rolling on the floor laughing. It’s an absolute delight in the way it starts off sounding exactly like something by Haydn and then proceeds to subject the theme to a veritable kaleidoscope of musical styles and techniques.


In between all of these Haydn tribute pieces, of course, are interspersed three actual Haydn sonatas, played stylishly by the album’s Croatian pianist, Javor Bra?i?. He’s a graduate of New York’s Mannes College of Music and a student in master classes given by Jerome Lowenthal and Richard Goode. He has partnered with the Hagen and Orion quartets, and concertized globally.


Some of the pieces on this disc, such as Ravel’s and Debussy’s minuets, have enjoyed numerous recordings and, even as a concept album, Labor’s disc is not entirely unique. There is, for example, a Gramola CD featuring pianist Manfred Wagner-Artzt, reviewed by James H. North in 34:1, that contains most of these same pieces, including the Fugue in E Minor by that sixth French composer, Charles-Marie Widor, omitted from the current program. Nonetheless, this is a well thought-out collection in which Bra?i? finds the ideal voice for each of the pieces and plays them with genuine feeling and, where called for, a degree of impish irreverence. Aside from the Kempf Sonatine, which some may appreciate more than I do, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly recommendable release.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

At 81, Lazar Nikolov is the doyen of Bulgarian musical modernism. Along with a small group of his contemporaries, Nikolov pioneered the use of avant-garde techniques in Bulgaria, giving them a distinctive Eastern European personality. His strong musical personality and the evolution of his innovative ideas are most forcefully expressed in his seven large-scale piano sonatas, three of which are performed by the formidable Bulgarian virtuosa, Angela Tosheva. They range in date from the Fifties to the Nineties, from the most oppressive period of the old regime to the freedom and recognition of recent years.

V 1: THRACIAN RHAPSODY - NEW W