First Contact with Martinaitytė Orchestral Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

My interest in Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė goes all the way back to May of 2018, when the Volti a cappella choir presented the world premiere performance of her “Chant des Voyelles” (incantation of vowels). Less than a year later Starkland released the premiere recording of her “In Search of Lost Beauty…,” a 70-minute composition for piano trio to be performed with synchronized video projections to provide (in the words of the composer) “an evening-long immersive experience.” At the beginning of this month, Ondine continued its series of releases of music by Baltic composers with Saudade, presenting world-premiere recordings of orchestral works that Martinaitytė composed between 2013 and 2019.

One of the four compositions was written for string ensemble and solo piano. The “Chiaroscuro Trilogy” was composed in 2017; and, on this album, pianist Gabrielius Alekna is joined by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Giedrė Šlekytė. This selection is preceded by three full-orchestra works with Šlekytė conducting the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. The entire album reinforced my “first contact” with Martinaitytė through “Chant des Voyelles,” whose approach to phonetic building-blocks left me with the impression that she could use human voices as alternative for electronic synthesis equipment.

In listening to the four compositions on Saudade, identifying which instruments are contributing to the overall sonorities tends not to be particularly difficult. Nevertheless, one can also appreciate the uniqueness of what is synthesized through those contributing sonorities. The result is a rhetoric in which darkness tends to prevail, whether it involves the melancholy associated with the Portuguese noun that provides the album with its title or the poignant gestures through which sonorities dissolve into each other across the movement boundaries of the “Chiaroscuro Trilogy.”

I suspect that each of the four pieces on this album are capable of providing ongoing journeys of discovery through a series of successive encounters. On the other hand I would suspect that the full rhetorical quality of any of these compositions will only really register when one is in the presence of the ensemble performing the music. Where “Chant des Voyelles” is concerned, the impact of synthesis most likely owes more to being in the presence of the vocalists contributing to the mix than to the sonorities that would be captured by recording equipment; and I conjecture that conditions would be the same when the sonorities are being synthesized by instruments, rather than voices.