On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist and violinist Alice Zawadzki, the pianist Fred Thomas who plays discursions on the vielle and percussion and Misha Mullov-Abbado on the double bass fuse folk idioms with an operatic flair and beguiling interplay, as Zawadski’s voice soars over a riverbed of keys and bass. Inhabiting the rarefied space where love calls and birdsongs go aflutter then swooping to encompass the forlorn strains and anguished cries which accompany betrayal and other losses of faith, on Za Górami they blend ladino traditionals and the Polish folk song of the title track with compositions by Gustavo Santaolalla and Simón Díaz plus a new setting of a poem by James Joyce.
Through swirling operatics, Latinate percussion and a bounding bass, Za Górami opens with ‘Dezile A Mi Amor’, a Sephardic song about bartered mules and fruit withering on the vine, which plays here as a fraught yet amorous Basque. Written by the Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla and originally performed as part of the acclaimed cycle Ayre by Osvaldo Golijov and the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the song ‘Suéltate las Cintas’ calls for the untying of one’s hair and a fulsome embrace of the night, with dolorous bass plucks, a vacillating figure on the keys and a limpid vocal before those plucky bass notes and a droning violin lay the ground for a sparkling piano solo in the second half of the piece, as Zawadzki’s voice returns to the fray for a final flourish.
One of the most prominent songs in the Sephardi repertoire, conjuring the flitting and sighing of nightingales and doves, ‘Los Bilbilikos’ here sounds almost like a hymnal, with a vestigial air as Thomas’s vielle carries an accordion’s wheeze. ‘Nani Nani’ is especially dramatic, as Mullov-Abbado’s bass serves like a blanket or ballast in support of a forlorn vocal and watery piano arpeggios, while the spare accompaniment makes ‘Je Suis Trop Jeunette’ sound positively phantasmagoric, as the trio unfold their slender rendition of Nicolas Gombert’s fabulistic Renaissance piece. Conflating periods and environments, the music here calls to mind a floating Ophelia in the famous painting by John Everett Millais.
Zawadzki, Thomas and Mullov-Abbado have been playing together in some form for almost a decade and the fruits of their labour are on full display with the title track. ‘Za Górami’ – which translates literally as ‘Beyond the mountains’ but serves in Polish as a stock phrase, used at the beginning of folk tales and fairytales in the manner of ‘Once upon a time’ – is an act in itself from a tremulous, quavering opening to hammered keys and the furtive scampering of the bass, windows being thrust open and curtains flapping in the wind before the more spare and languorous second half shows a deft interplay between the instruments, as the tension steadily builds and then dissipates in the climax.
Best known as a short story writer and novelist, the strident modernism and gushing streams of consciousness which define James Joyce’s fiction give way in his poetry to a more temperate and even somewhat fatigued classicism. His first publication Chamber Music was admired by Ezra Pound for its ‘delicate temperament’ while Joyce himself reflected that when he wrote the collection ‘I was a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that one day a girl would love me’. Fred Thomas adds to the corpus of adaptations with a new setting of the poem ‘Gentle Lady, Do Not Sing’ which boasts the transience of love and broaches an eternal sleep, with Thomas’s composition here inspired by Baroque monodies. And after the plunging and clattering of the hand-clasping ‘Dame La Mano’, the record draws to an elegant and silvery close with ‘Arvoles Lloran por Lluvias’, a wistful song from a foreign land which endures through its fading grief.
