London-based Alexander Balanescu has created this very special recording as an imaginative reconnection with the national music and soul of his childhood Romania. His muse is the iconic singer and folk song collector Maria Tanase. Tanase was a major star in Romania and beyond until her death from lung cancer in 1953 at the age of 50. Her singing was passionate, rich and worldly. Her songs were gathered from the Romanian folk song traditions and violins provided a swirling backdrop to her theatrical and emotional delivery, alternately despairing and delirious.
This two part work from BALANESCU'S string quartet (with percussion from Steve Arguelles and some sampled vocal tracks from Tanase herself) is split into eleven separate pieces, and so has the general appearance and feel of an album from contemporary popular music. A post-rock album with an A and B side, maybe, adding up to well over an hour of music.
It doesn’t mimic the folk or music hall styles of Tanase. It has a more astringent, almost monastic tone at times. It does turn emotional and heart-stopping in some beautifully lyrical passages, but the music is distinctly "composed" and only when the voice of Tanase comes in does the passion rise to the point of abandonment more familiar to rock and roll audiences.
The use of Steve Arguelles beautifully commanding drumming at key moments will grate with some of Balanescu's academy chums I suppose. But to my alt folk rock tuned ears it sounds pretty wonderful. Like the addition of the vocal samples, it seems to add crucial landmarks in what could otherwise be a very long journey into bewildering territory.
A most piercing ache of a violin tune comes in early at item two: "The Conscript and the Moon". For me it evokes homesickness, fear of a meaningless death, the terrors of the night and, ultimately, a stoic acceptance. I guess these are some of the composers intentions, playing his own lines with a controlled and pure tone.
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The jolliest part of the work is a drinking song "Wine's So Good": the penultimate track. The drumming is knees-up time and Maria Tanase's stolen voice leaps about in virtuoso hilarity that teeters on the edge of falling on its very generous arse.
The spookiest moment is at the beginning of "Mountain Call", with a spun out line making Tanase's voice sound like a bell in a huge landscape while Balanescu's precise and fragile violin part quivers like a tiny flower in an icy wind. This is a guaranteed goose bump moment – fully justifying the purchase of the whole CD (as if it didn’t already have plenty of virtues).
"Lullaby Dream" as the last piece looks back to the childhood: part remembered, part reconstructed, part yearned for. It draws together the postmodern film score, the modern cabaret song and the ancient Romany traditions in a very satisfying and unifying finale.
The past has gone, for sure. But this music does seem to do what Balanescu hoped for it – that it would build a personal bridge between fragile and disappearing cultures and our own scary world.
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