Pancho VLADIGEROV (1899-1978)
Orchestral Songs
Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Vladigerov
rec. 1970-75
Texts and translations included
CAPRICCIO C8070 [85:31]
This is the fifth volume of the Vladigerov edition from Capriccio and once again it mines the exceptional richness of LP recordings made in the first half of the 1970s when Vladigerov was still alive. As before, the orchestral support could hardly be more persuasive or idiomatic, being undertaken by the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the composer’s son, Alexander.
Vladigerov followed the precedent of senior composers in Berlin and Vienna – where he had spent his early years – in expanding songs from piano accompanied ones to the realm of orchestral song. Mahler, Strauss and Pfitzner may have shown him the way though Joseph Marx and Korngold would have emphasised the validity and value of this expansion. Vladigerov usually wrote the songs for orchestral forces many years after he had first set them for voice and piano. It was of a piece with his re-examination of many of his works in which popular themes appear time and again in different instrumental or orchestral guises. This is also something that has been reinforced in the first four volumes of this edition.
In the main, unless composing for the stage, he focused on Bulgarian literature for his songs. The process began in 1917 with his Six Lyric Poems and Lud Gidyia (or ‘Wild Gidyia’). The Lyric Poems are marked by romantic turbulence and a surfeit of orchestral atmospherics. Though it’s a short cycle and the songs are themselves quite compact, the music has Vladigerov’s keynote melancholy tempestuousness at its core. Roumiana Valcheva-Evrova finds the expressive heart of each song with unerring immediacy. Rich-voiced Pavel Gerdjikov sings the ballad Wild Gidyia in this 1978 arrangement for bass and orchestra. This is Vladigerov at his most avuncular, communicative and generous. It’s not quite four minutes in length but packs an operatic punch.
The compilation of Bulgarian Folksongs, predominantly drawn from his Opp. 41-43 sets but which also contains two from Op.32, is also sung by Gerdjikov and he proves a multi-faceted interpreter, dealing justly with the variety of moods in these eleven songs – boisterous, jovial and avuncular, full of warmth and verdancy and occasional brief moments of not-too-serious melancholy. The orchestrations are apposite and late-Romantic. The intriguing sonorities encoded in the Four Songs for high voice, Op.67, sensitively sung by Maria Ventsislavova, offer another side to Vladigerov – the spring rain of the first song is impressionist in influence though in the next, The Sky is So Blue, there’s a sense of Straussian rapture and opulence that sweeps all before it. The militaristic March of the final song brings the cycle to a strong, sinewy conclusion. There’s nothing especially Bulgarian here, the music focusing on Austro-Germanic verities, in the main, apart from that first song.
Clearly very different is the set of Six Bulgarian Folksongs, much more reminiscent of the Folksongs for bass, and sung this time by Evelina Stoitseva. She puts on a charming ‘little girl’ voice in the third song, taking on the role of a child talking to her mother. Elsewhere you won’t avoid – and won’t want to avoid – touches of lingering, languorous romanticism not least in the expressively sweeping setting of Vălko, Vălko.
As before in this series, the remastering has brought out every facet of the up-front LP sound quality and the fine notes, courtesy of Christian Heindl, are in English and German. Texts and translations are included. The twofer lasts 85 minutes in total. You may have gravitated swiftly to the concertos and orchestral works in previous releases but don’t overlook this latest volume.
Jonathan Woolf
Contents
Bulgarian Folksongs
Dafino, Wine!, Op. 42 No. 5 [3:13]
Early, Radka Went, Op. 43 No. 5 [3:57]
Ah, Dimitro Iyo, Op. 42 No. 2 [1:44]
The Forest Was Winding, Op. 32 No. 1 [4:36]
Old Dimo, Op. 42 No. 5 [4:55]
From the Mountain, Ma, Climbs Down a Young Shepard, Op. 43 No. 6 [1:56]
A Maiden from Shoumen [4:58]
Mincho Winked at Minka, Op. 41 No. 6 [1:33]
An Old Man Pastures Cattle [3:36]
Nine Years Have Passed, Yonke, Op. 32 No. 5 [4:26]
A Whistle Whistles to Me in Dark Recesses, Op. 32 No. 6 [2:12]
Pavel Gerdjikov (bass)
Six Lyric Poems, Op.5 (1917) [16:07]
Roumiana Valcheva-Evrova (soprano)
Lud Gidiya (Wild Gidiya), Op. 5 (1917 arr 1978) [3:47]
Pavel Gerdjikov (bass)
Four Songs, Op.67 [9:19]
Maria Ventsislavova (soprano)
Bulgarian Folk Songs, Op. 56 [18:45]
Evelina Stoitseva (soprano)
Song for the Beloved [2:58]
Roumiana Valcheva-Evrova (soprano)
