| home | music diary intro | index to music | contact |
In 1996, the Bulgarian women's choir, Angelite, teamed up with Huun-Huur-Tu for the stunning, unforgettable Fly, Fly My Sadness (Shanachie). The Moscow Art Trio now joins them all for Mountain Tale, adding a rich new dimension with piano, french horn, clarinet, and more.
The album starts with the spontaneous combustion of two different folk songs combined in rehearsal. "Two soloists of the choir had proposed a song.... Suddenly Sergey Starostin began to accompany it with a completely different song. It was amazing how organically it happened," say the unusually informative liner notes.
Mountain Tale is uneven -- you can't just have Angelite sing a Bulgarian folk tune while jazz piano noodles in the background, as they try in "Sad Harvest" (track 5); it works about as well as basil ice cream. And, as is so often the case, the blending is too timid, songs such as "Grand Finale," (track 8 out of 10) arranged to showcase each group's talents in sequence. Hey, we don't need convincing.
But the excitement of "New Skomorohi" (track 4) more than makes up for it, or "Mountain Fairy-Tale" (track 6), a vivid soundscape: calling the cows home up in the mountains of Valdres, Norway. Mikhail Alperin plays cowbells, Tanja Douparinova and Kera Damianova cry an amazing Norwegian cow-call, and the Tuvan throat-singers answer out of the twilit fog as the cows -- plus one crow, perched on the bough of a towering evergreen nearby. The stunning mix of Bulgarian, Tuvan, and classical European vocal styles that follows is what it's all about, as far as I'm concerned.