There’s plenty to admire and enjoy among the five substantial pieces on Motus, the new album from a Ukrainian woman composer whose activities range from playing folk to setting up an electronic music studio at Ukraine’s National Music Academy. Alla Zagaykevych’s work carries a whiff of the conservatoire and the sometimes heartless world of academic electroacoustic music, but for all her confident manipulation of modernist idioms, she never disguises the fact that there are real human beings involved. Motus’s title track is a seething writhe of electronica. Occasionally we hear the good old-fashioned sound of university music studios, what I think of as cuckoo clocks being smashed up with tubular bells, but otherwise Zagaykevych’s palette is more swirling cauldron than hardhat junkyard. She paints powerful sound images which lead to a scalp-stretching climax ten minutes in. Pagode pits the recorders of Jorge Isaac against live electronics, while Heroneya does the same with a quartet of cello, violin, piano and bassoon. Plenty of drama here, though I confess that when the electronics arrived I got an image of a tide of alien slime engulfing a Midwich Cuckoos-type village (the rural bassoon, perhaps), and this image was hard to shake off. There’s also a trio for violin, guitar and accordion, which moves playfully from Webern’s world to meditative moments. Best is the cello duet Gravitation, beautifully performed by Duo Violoncellissimo – no straitjacket here as Zagaykevych achieves the effervescent, skedaddling brio of an improvisation, coupled to the organised synchronicity of composition. Several times Zagaykevych contrives sublime endings to her pieces. In particular the album’s closing minutes, a reverie of high harmonics, show a composer moving from mastery of modernist style into something more personal.
BY CLIVE BELL
Review
Alla Zagaykevych – motus
Alla Zagaykevych is a composer from the Ukraine. Among other things she has attended the annual composition course at IRCAM. She is currently a lecturer at the National Music Academy of Ukraine. This CD consists of five pieces for chamber forces of varying magnitude; two purely acoustic, two electro-acoustic and one purely electronic piece.
Alla Zagaykevych – Motus
The Nexsound label may have released a whole bunch of different music on MP3, CDR and CD, but so far they didn’t touch the serious avant-garde. But with the release of ‘Motus’ by Alla Zagaykevych they do. She is from the Ukraine and studied at the conservatorium in Kiev, composition and orchestration and later on at the IRCAM in Paris. In 1998 she set up the Musical Electronic Studio. Her works is both for chamber ensembles, solo instruments aswell as electronica. This nicely packed CD contains five of her works, of which the title piece is a strict electronic composition in the best IRCAM composers tradition. On the other end of the spectrum is ‘Gravitation’ for two violin-cellos and ‘Sans L’Eloignement De La Terre’ violin, guitar and accordion and for both no electronics. The two other pieces combines instruments and electronic. The nicest piece there is ‘Pagode’ for block-flutes (which I thought were called ‘recorders’ in english) and live electronics. Here both elements blend together and acoustic instrument becomes one with the electric charges – or perhaps vice versa. The serious composing of the aforementioned ‘Sans L’Eloignement De La Terre’ and ‘Gravitation’ is probably done nicely, but the kind of music is never well-spend on me. I guess it just makes me nervous, but perhaps this works better in a concert auditorium. ‘Heromeya’ works stylistically in the same way, but the electronics take over and makes this into a highly complex but great piece. The title piece is a bit of an odd-ball in this collection with it’s serious connotations, but it works well. I guess a good introduction to Zagaykevych’s work and surely I’d be interested in hearing, especially the electronic work. (FdW)