Download Review by Martin Anderson

SPASSOV Canti dei Morti
Ivan Spassov, conductor; Pazardjik Symphony Orchestra 1; Radio Sofia Chamber Orchestra “Simfonieta“
2; Rumyana Evrova, Valentina Alexandrova, Emilia Maximova, Ticha Genova, sopranos; Krikor Chetinian,
conductor; Female Chamber Choir of the Plovdiv Academy 3. • LABOR LAB 7014-2 [ADD/DDD]; 71:46.
Produced by Stefka Mashdrakova and Atanas Baynov. (Distributed by Passport.)
Canti dei Morti. Canti lamentosi. Twenty-three Lines from Emily Dickinson. Three Poems by Ann Day. Holy Bulgarian Liturgy3. Songs
of a Soul Flying to Paradise.
The title of this CD and the gloomy pictures of the composer on the front and back indicate the general tone of the music to be found within—but not
the general quality of the music. The notes, by Eric Salzman, are written with the kind of insight you can expect when one composer writes of another
with those aims he sympathizes; and Salzman reveals himself as both a witty and sensitive stylist. He begins by giving something of the background
against which avant-garde music in Eastern Europe has be understood, and then explains how Ivan Spassov (or Spasov, depending on how you
transliterate it) fits into it. Spassov was born into a musical family in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, in 1934 (just a few months behind Salzman, as it happens). He studied in Sofia with Pantcho Vladigerov and then in Warsaw with Kasimierz Sikorksi and Stanislaw Wislocki, “both notable figures in the
new Polish music,“ as Salzman points out. When Spassov returned to Bulgaria he took up conductorships in Plovdiv and Pazardjik, and developed a
reputation also as a teacher. “These jobs [Salzman continues] protected him to a degree from the official commissioning and performance system and
enabled him to take an independent position as a composer.“
Some of the fruits of that independent position can be heard here. Salzman again, on Spassov‘s style:
As both a composer and conductor, Spassov has introduced most of the major new techniques of contemporary music to Bulgaria and pioneered a
few of his own; these include serialism, aleatory or chance, electroacoustic or tape music in live performances, graphic notation, free rhythmic coordination, and so forth. Although Spassov owes something to the Western European serialists, to Pendercela and the modern Polish school, and even to
Americans like Ives and Cage, his work has evolved steadily into a very distinctive area of personal expression involving the use of repeated, overlapping and non-coordinated fragments or cells and the simultaneous introduction of music from the rich vein of Bulgarian folklore into the language and
form of contemporary music.
I find the music dignified and sober in expression but not entirely individual in style, intriguing as you listen but not always lingering in the memory. But
there is much here to impress nonetheless, particular in the stylized nobility of the vocal writing. The six works on this disc have been collected from a
series of performances given by Spassov himself, either with the Pazardjik Chamber or Symphony Orchestras or the Radio Sofia Chamber Orchestra
(with the exception of the Holy Bulgarian Liturgy, in which the Female Chamber Choir of the Plovdiv Academy is conducted by Krikor Chetinian), recorded over a period stretching from 1980 to 1993. All but the Liturgy feature a solo soprano (two in the Canti lamentosi). Two of the works (the shortest
here) are settings of, improbably for a composer based in Bulgaria, Emily Dickinson and the New Jersey poetess Ann Day, but they maintain the
funerary atmosphere of the longer, more explicitly death-related pieces, the voice soaring inconsolate over apparently directionless orchestral textures.
Most of the music has the character of ritual, as if formality would spare the composer any personal expression of grief, but in one work in particular—the Holy Bulgarian Liturgy, “written in praise of our Lord Jesus Christ with the supplication that He grant peace to the soul of my daughter Joanna,
who presented herself to Him almost a child“—Spassov‘s own feelings are too strong to be suppressed by form: of all six works, this is both the most
beautiful and the most directly touching, largely because of the simplicity of its expression. And the creation of atmosphere in Songs of a Soul Flying to
Paradise (the soul in question being that of Joanna, who was his only daughter) is masterly—this is a piece that will indeed reside in my memory.
The recorded quality—sometimes analog, sometimes digital—is good, and Spassov has been as fortunate in his choice of sopranos as in his annotator. Recommended for those with a sense of curiosity about the music being written today; the more conservative might find it a little harder going
(which doesn‘t mean they shouldn‘t try, of course).
—Martin Anderson