Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova was impressed during her studies by such figures as Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, and perhaps Alfred Schnittke. Yet the music on this collection doesn't follow any of those examples slavishly. The Baroque elements of Schnittke's music are present in the Suite in Old Style for viola, harpsichord, and strings, but there is nothing neo-classic about the work. Instead, Tabakova extends the massed sound of Baroque music into a series of abstract planes, ornamented with other small ...
Read More
Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova was impressed during her studies by such figures as Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, and perhaps Alfred Schnittke. Yet the music on this collection doesn't follow any of those examples slavishly. The Baroque elements of Schnittke's music are present in the Suite in Old Style for viola, harpsichord, and strings, but there is nothing neo-classic about the work. Instead, Tabakova extends the massed sound of Baroque music into a series of abstract planes, ornamented with other small details of Baroque concerto style. The effect is completely individual, and so it goes through the rest of the program, with references to traditional styles that seem at once completely natural and thoroughly decontextualized. Frozen River Flows, for violin, accordion, and double bass, seems inevitably to refer to Schubert's cycle Die Winterreise, yet it captures the tension of that work in an entirely different way from the original. The string septet Such Different Paths, written...
Read Less