Ondine Releases Second Martinaitytė Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

Those familiar with this site probably know by now that the Helsinki-based label Ondine has committed itself to releasing albums of music by Baltic composers. Yesterday it released its second album of music by Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, entitled Ex Tenebris Lux (from darkness comes light). In these tenuous (a lame attempt at a pun) times, Amazon.com has not (yet?) created a Web page for either purchasing the CD or downloading the tracks; so, as of this writing, the above hyperlink leads to a purchase page on the Barnes & Noble Web site.

The title of the previous Ondine album was Saudade, and it presented four world-premiere recordings of orchestral works that Martinaitytė composed between 2013 and 2019. Ex Tenebris Lux presents three subsequent world-premiere offerings of works composed in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The most recent of these is the composition after which the entire album is named.

As was the case on the Saudade album, the ensemble is the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, conducted this time by Karolis Variakojis. The performance of “Ex Tenebris Lux” is flanked on either side by tracks on the album that feature a soloist. The opening selection is “Nunc fluens. Nunc stans.,” based on a passage in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy that cites “the now that passes” and “the now that remains.” The performance requires a solo percussionist (Pavel Giunter) to perform with an ensemble of eighteen string instruments (eight violins, four violas, four cellos, and two basses), each of which has a unique part. The title of the third selection is “Sielunmaisema” (Finnish for “soul-landscape”). It is a four-movement composition scored for cello (Rokas Vaitkevičius) and a string orchestra of at least 21 players.

Once again I found myself drawn to the techniques that Martinaitytė deploys to develop a rhetoric of sonorities. These impressions have emerged not only from listening to her Ondine albums but also to my “first contact” encounter with “Chant des Voyelles” (incantation of vowels), which was given its world premiere performance here in San Francisco at a concert by the Volti a cappella choir in May of 2018. Martinaitytė’s music gives the impression that she has had extensive experience with synthesizing sounds through electronic and/or or digital hardware and that she then tries to duplicate those sounds with instrumental and/or vocal resources. The attentive listener must be aware of not only the overall sonorities but also the abundance of detailed “building blocks” from which those sonorities emerge.

In that context I try to shy away from listening to an entire album as a single experience. Each composition is the result of a unique strategy that leads to distinctive sonorities, most of which are not encountered in other compositions. Thus, the Ex Tenebris Lux album (as well as the earlier Saudade album) does not provide a sit-back-and-listen experience.

One would do better to deal with each of the three compositions in “isolation,” not subjecting it to any sense of “context” provided by the entire album. This may not be how most readers tend to approach recorded music. However, I suspect that such readers are not particularly committed to attentive listening. Suffice to say that those willing to make such a commitment will be rewarded beyond any expectations!