Customer Reviews

Maria T

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1987, Alexander Balanescu left the Arditti Quartet to form his own Balanescu Quartet and in the time since they've gone on to gain a reputation as one of the worlds leading contemporary musical foursomes. Seemingly working without any genre boundaries, the group has collaborated with Gavin Bryars, Ornette Coleman, David Byrne, the Pet Shop Boys, Spiritualized, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, and others. They've created film scores (Angels And Insects), have contributed to film scores (The Garden) and have released a slew of unique and interesting albums, performing both interpretations of other artists work and original scores of their own.

Maria T is the first work from the group in almost five years (since 2000's Il Partigiano Gionni) and clocking in at almost eighty minutes is absolutely epic in scope. The album re-connects Alexander Balanescu with his Romanian roots, as it pays tribute to one of his earliest musical influences, the iconic folk singer and actress Maria Tanase. For the release, he took the works of Tanase and then re-imagined them through his own eclectic musical perspectives, and the result is easily some of the most stunning work ever from the group.

As with many of their releases, Maria T isn't simply the work of a string quartet as it encorporates percussion and even sampled vocals from Tanase. "Spotdance" opens the release with a rather upbeat note as a repeated string motif pans back and forth as violin melodies unfold on top of it and percussion chugs away in a subtle but persistant way. The way the track unfolds and even the way that it's constructed owes a lot to electronic music (especially in the repeated and layered melodic pieces), and like the best work of the group re-imagines the music in a way that holds the elements of the original while taking it new places.

"Empty Space Dance" takes some of the same elements as the first track and weaves them in an even more exotic way, unfolding elements even more slowly before percussion enters the track about three-quarters of the way through and really changes the direction before it again falls away. "Mountain Call" is only one of several tracks that use the sampled vocals of Tanase and as one would expect, the group gives them an almost reverential feel, letting the vocals themselves take the foreground and reverberate for long periods of time while only providing quiet and subtle melodic reflections.

With eleven tracks that fill nearly the physical maximum allowed by CD technology, there are enough highlights that I could spend nearly an entire paragraph talking about each track. Suffice to say, the five-year break certainly doesn't mean that the group was going through any sort of a slump if this is the result. From the melancholy and reflective "Aria" to the playful fiddling of "Interlude," Maria T is a release that shows off the power of a group of musicians who refuse to be bound in by simple genre definitions. Much like the Kronos Quartet, the Balanescu Quartet have often shrugged-off many expectations one may have of a string quartet, and with this release will hopefully finally garner even more of the attention they deserve.

(from almost cool music reviews)

Creative, pulsing, at times melancholy, others like travelling to a slavic smokey den in the 20's. Not avant garde - not going through the motions.

Not a typical string quartet album, some percussion at times, Dietrich like vocals in Romanian that sound like a 78 record on a couple of tracks (hence why this is a CD are interpretations of a famous Romanian female vocalist back in the 30's (?). Emotionally powerful.

The first track has a pulse underneath that would not be out of place on an electronic ambient loop session, but it is all acoustic. You do not need a laptop to make interesting music.

As a fan of lots of music genres (if you have to use them), this would appeal to ambient heads (the Budd-Eno kind), Philip Glass worshippers, indie elitists a la Animal Collective, Mice Parade, Low, etc., jazz purists, string quartet lovers that will go out of the box, world music lovers from bandoleon to slavic waltzes.

Go for it.

The Maria T. of the title is Maria Tanase, a popular singer very famous in Alexander Balanescu's native Romania, active from the end of the 1930s to her death of cancer in the early 1960s. Her own songs were often adapted from the Romanian treasure-chest of folk songs, and were apparently often of bittersweet nature. The reasons of Balanescu's choice of that source material are obvious, very intimate and clearly stated in the liner notes. "As an eternal foreigner, I attempt repeatedly to reconnect myself to the cultural background f the country where I grow up".

Balanescu's intent, stated in the liner notes, was not to do just transcriptions, but to take the Tanase source as a point of departure to entirely new and personal compositions. He says it better than I do: "my intention was not to make transcriptions or arrangements of the ethnic material but to develop through my own particular musical perspective a new personal language, while always remaining true to the sprit of the original source material". Yet, those familiar with the two previous Balanescu albums on Mute, Possessed and Luminitza, will not discover here any unfamiliar territory. The compositional formulas are pretty repetitive: soaring, lyrical phrases, often plaintive and nostalgic, over repetitive accompaniment, either rhythmic and dance-like or slow-moving. The music is intensely lyrical in its plaintive way, never more Gipsy-sounding (which somehow sounds also very Jewish) than on track 2. Track 6, "Mountain Call", is especially mesmerizing in its otherworldliness. Balanescu adds a pop-music drum accompaniment at the end of track 3, around the 7:30 mark (some of these songs are quite long, some of them a bit too long I found: too much repetitive music tends to outstay its welcome). Sometimes he uses the original song as a kind of "background music" or accompaniment over which he elaborates (track 4, 6, 10). What you can hear of Tanase's voice is confirmed by a website on which you can hear a selection of 59 of her songs in original form. To find it, go to her entry on the invaluable people-processed and free on-line encyclopedia, and at the end of the article you will find the link. In the selection I sampled, the voice sounded like that of an old woman - you can fancy a village singer alright: a (powerful) viola rather than a violin. Balanescu's compositions put a nostalgia therein that I don't always hear in the original songs. So Balanescu has, indeed, transcended his source material. Yet I find his first album, "Possessed", more varied in its moods and sonic invention and therefore more accomplished and entertaining. For this one I'd rate 3 1/2 stars if I could: 3 because it is a little to uniform in its compositional processes and plaintive/nostalgic mood, 4 because it is pleasurable and easy listening.

TT 77:44

'Maria T' greatest virtues reside in the clever interraction, facilitated by digital technology, of interweaving contemporary string work with the famed Romanian folk singer of fifty plus years ago, Maria Tanase. Balanescu has imaginatively complemented the melodic lines of the original folk tunes, and where Maria doesn't appear, the results are pleasant, if not startling. The opening track is an accurate index of thge remainder, hypnotic in its slowly built, repetitive stanzas. It's with a sigh of relief that Tanase's haunting vocals eventually appears mid way through proceedings. 'Mountain Call' is by far the most attractive number, and the reason I purchased the CD. It's an easy jump to imagine Tanase standing to deliver this from one side of a verdant valley. Has anyone heard of Leda Velladares, a Brazillian folk collector/singer I met in the early 80s in Paris? Tanase has the South-American's commanding depth of register and interpretive powers. For me, Balanescu would have improved this effort by slipping this chantreuse into more of his compositions.

In despite of the traditional string quartet ensemble and the lack of "easy melody tricks" just to please the audience from the very first listening , Alexander Balanescu is buildig up slowly,in time and space an amazing ipnotic sea of sounds strongly bound to his Romanian folk roots.Take your time, the distant " mountain call " and the overlapping patterns leading to the entrace of the amazing voice of Maria Tanase will just leave you wandering the countryside of some Romanian village where the music sounds as still bound to the mystery of life.