Peter Nothnagle

A Tribute to Stesha, the Russian-Gypsy Diva
Talisman: Anne Harley, voice; Etienne Abelin, violin and voice; Oleg Timofeyev, Russian 7-string guitar and voice
Kolpakov Trio: Aleksandr and Vadim Kolpakov, Russian 7-string guitar and voice; Tamara Cherepovskaia, voice and dance
Publisher's website: Naxos World 76065-2

The Gypsy peoples spread from their origins in India in the 11th century throughout Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Republics, and America. Although they have preserved elements of their distinctive culture wherever they settled, they melded their language, music, and dance with the local cultures. New and influential artistic traditions were thus created, the most celebrated of which is probably the Flamenco music and dance of Spain. Many European musicians have been inspired by the energy and freshness of Gypsy traditions -- Haydn, Brahms, De Falla, and Bartok, to name a few.

Meanwhile, the imperial court of Russia was emulating the cultural accomplishments of the other great capitals, fostering an artistic environment rich with literature, art, architecture, and music. In addition to enjoying the finest cultural output of the West, the Russian aristocrats promoted native art forms. Thus the music and dance of the Gypsies were brought into the cultural life of the Russian upper class at the beginning of the 19th century. Aristocratic amateurs and hardscrabble Gypsy professional musicians met, collaborated, and were inspired by each other. It is this intersection of musical cultures that the recording explores.

For this CD, performing ensembles specializing in these two traditions were brought together thanks to the creative vision of Talisman co-director Oleg Timofeyev. Talisman is a trio devoted to rediscovering and performing the music of the aristocracy of early 19th-century Russia -- the title of their debut CD, Music of Russian Princesses from the Court of Catherine the Great sums it up neatly. Their music is refined and sophisticated, and the members are all specialists in early music performance. The Kolpakov Trio perform traditional and modern music and dance of the Russian Gypsies, with all the flash and passion one could ask for.

The focus of this program is the music performed and inspired by an extraordinarily talented young Gypsy singer, Stepanida Soldatova (1787-1822), called "Stesha" by her circle. A member of a famous Gypsy choir, her talent was noticed by a wealthy patron who saw to her education and promoted her career -- or so the story goes. What is undeniable is that she applied her tremendous talent to singing traditional Russian and Gypsy songs in operatic style, and that she became enormously popular, inspiring many musicians of her own and later generations.

The precise details of Stesha's performances are lost in time. What scholarship can reveal are lists of some of the songs she sang, and manuscripts and published music by musicians whom she inspired. Passionate performances by a uniquely talented singer, accompanied by Gypsy violin and several strumming guitars, were distilled to rather plain-looking published songs for voice and piano. Brilliant improvisations were turned into sets of themes and variations for the consumption of amateur guitarists. Talisman and the Kolpakov Trio uncovered these sources, and contemporary descriptions of Stesha's performances, then drew on their respective performing traditions to recreate a performance by a "Gypsy diva" accompanied by first-rate traditional and classical instrumentalists.

The six musicians who created this recording learned a tremendous amount from each other, and did a superb job of integrating each others' musical traditions. I am sure that not all the discussions were calm and reasoned. I observed that fine food and vodka helped to erase some artistic disagreements as they worked to recreate a unique moment in music.

Recording A Tribute to Stesha posed some interesting challenges. I can't help but bring my Western, classical music sensibilities to a project, and thus I like to get several takes of each song with the right words, the right notes, in tune, consistent tempo, etc. The Gypsy tradition is a bit different -- to start with, a song never seems to be performed the same way twice. Everything is memorized and improvised, so for instance, a dazzling, pyrotechnic guitar solo with some wrong notes in the middle can never be repeated with the right notes. The guitar technique, honed in countless restaurant gigs, could be described as "play as loud as possible at all times." With all this in mind, I decided to make the recording using a multi-track recorder with a separate microphone for each performer, in order to get the proper balance later, under more controlled conditions. The recording was made entirely "live" to multitrack, with no overdubbing, selecting the best of several performances of each piece, and with some editing between them.

The microphones I used were a stereo pair Neumann TLM103 for the vocal soloists, Schoeps MK4 and MK41 for the guitars, and Oktava MC012 for the violin. A pair of Neumann KM140 were used as an overall pickup. A Soundcraft Spirit ProTracker mixer was used for its microphone preamps, and the recording was made on an Alesis ADAT XT. Finally, the multitrack recording was mixed at Trilogy Productions Recording Studio in North Liberty, Iowa, and edited at my home studio.

Sayuk: Together in Harmony
Sumunar Gamelan Ensemble
Indonesian Performing Arts Association of Minnesota IPAAM001
Performer's website: http://ipaam.org

I have carried my recording equipment through the doors of the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota more times than I can count. The Museum is home to some of the most important early keyboard instruments in the world, and I have made many recordings there. The Museum staff are all friends of mine and I always look forward to projects there.

Yet I was feeling faintly apprehensive when I walked through those doors on a May morning in 2007. I was about to meet 19 members of the Sumunar Gamelan Ensemble, who had traveled from the Twin Cities to make a recording on the Museum's Javanese gamelan. I was pretty sure I was in over my head.

A gamelan is a sort of orchestra of percussion instruments, which play the subtle, sophisticated, beautiful courtly music of the islands of Indonesia. The music, and the instruments, have a long history and a set of traditions at least as complicated as those of the European orchestra. To the uneducated observer, and I am certainly one of those, there is very little in common between the two musical traditions -- meter, melody, and harmony are not meaningful terms, and the tuning systems (there are several) are completely unrelated to the Western scale.

The recording was to make use of the gamelan in the Museum's collection, which was given the name "Kyai Rengga Manis Everist" in a traditional naming ceremony in 2003. It was created especially for the Museum, and is said to be the most complete and beautiful set outside of the palaces of Java. The individual instruments range from sets of metal and wooden bars set in racks (like a xylophone or marimba), to tuned bronze pots, to sets of gongs (some several feet in diameter), to various drums. There are also bowed and plucked string instruments, and some simple bamboo flutes. All are richly decorated with carved hardwoods and lavish amounts of gold leaf.

I immediately discovered that the Sumunar ensemble is composed of regular midwestern folks who happen to be passionate about this music, and they are very good (and very experienced) at explaining it to anyone who is curious. The ensemble is directed by Joko Sutrisno, an internationally-known performer and scholar from Java. There were also two guest artists, I.M. Harjito (from Wesleyan College, Middletown, CT) and Midiyanto (from the University of California, Berkeley).

The project had actually begun several months earlier, when a delegation from the Sumunar ensemble had spent several days tuning the individual instruments that would be used in the recording. The tuning was accomplished with various power and hand tools, and dust masks were required attire.

The recording was a technical challenge. An authentic performance would actually take place outdoors, but we were in the Museum's small recital hall, so obviously the acoustical setting was wrong. And whereas I know just what to do to make a European orchestra sound right, what is "right" for a gamelan? Some of the instruments are a lot quieter than others -- should that natural balance be preserved, or do the quiet ones need a little "help"?

The instruments completely filled the space, so there was no possibility of shifting them around to achieve the desired balance. I set up a minimalist "main pair" of microphones, and few carefully-chosen extras. I recorded each microphone to a separate channel on a multitrack recorder, and was able to get the proper balance later, with the input of the musicians.

Everyone worked very hard over the two days of the recording. Although the music is partly improvised, it is certainly possible to make mistakes, and if someone really "runs off the rails," the whole ensemble can fall apart. It was not possible to pick up a performance in the middle, so there were a lot of false starts. Although the music was very strange to my ears, it was obvious that the musicians knew precisely what they were doing. I was very impressed when two complete performances of a 23-minute piece, separated by several false starts and a lunch break, were exactly the same length, to the second.

Several weeks after the recording session, Joko traveled to my studio in Iowa City to work with me on mixing and editing. Then some "enhanced CD" features were added to the audio master -- the published CD contains a nice slideshow of photos from the recording session as well as documentary photos and short descriptions of all the instruments, provided by the Museum.

Gathering/Hui
Belladonna Baroque Quartet (Clea Galhano, recorder; Margaret Humphrey, baroque violin; Rebecca Humphrey, baroque cello; Barbara Weiss, harpsichord), with Gao Hong, Chinese pipa
Ten Thousand Lakes SC120

It can be a little lonely, being a lover of early music in the midwest. Brightening the northern horizon considerably, the four fine musicians of Belladonna have been electrifying audiences in the Twin Cities, as well as internationally, for many years. Each member is a virtuoso in her own right, and over the years they have made many contributions to the other notable Twin Cities early music ensembles, especially the Lyra Concert baroque orchestra and Ex Machina baroque opera company.

As the Belladonna Baroque Quartet, they have produced many feisty, imaginative performances. Yet I was taken aback at their idea of collaborating with a traditional Chinese musician in what must be a rare if not unique experiment, combining the folk music traditions of two very different cultures in an unlikely esperanto of 17th-century European music played on recorder, violin, cello, harpsichord, and pipa.

The pipa is a Chinese plucked string instrument with a long history. Everyone who has eaten at a Chinese restaurant has heard one as part of the background music -- the characteristics of its sound include a very percussive pluck, a wide, expressive vibrato, and tremolo capable of very agile changes in dynamics. Gao Hong, the performer on this recording, is a masterful performer with a stunning list of academic credits, international performances, and prizes.

The program is a skillful mélange of Chinese and Western music. There are some fairly straight readings of early baroque dances, which get a little "lift" from the extra, "foreign"-sounding dimension of the pipa in an accompanying role. Then there are beautiful, lyrical Chinese pieces, which combine the pipa as the solo instrument with the warm, sustained sound of the cello or recorder. The American performers do a fine job of playing in Chinese style. Margaret Humphrey makes the baroque violin into a totally convincing Chinese instrument on "Huang Haihuai", a depiction of a furious horse race (ending with the only recording of a baroque violin imitating a horse's neigh of which I am aware).

Of course, many of the pieces on this recording were adapted in some way to accommodate the unusual instrumentation, but I would especially like to mention the "arrangements", which are more like completely original compositions, by harpsichordist Barbara Weiss. The term "crossover" doesn't begin to do justice to the originality of her pieces, which combine east and west, old and new, and classical, traditional, and popular, to make these pieces the highlights of the CD.

The recording was made over a period of three chilly, snowy days at Hamline United Methodist Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The usual problems of recording in an urban church, principal among them being scheduling, were augmented by the hissing, clanking, clicking, and other onomatopoeia of the steam heating system. A more interesting challenge was to balance these very different instruments -- the pipa is a lot louder than the other plucked instrument present, the harpsichord. In fact it is louder than the other four instruments put together. The performers were all very patient as I worked to resolve these problems.

I used a single near-coincident pair of Neumann KM140 microphones, a Studio Technologies Mic-PreEminence preamp, and an Alesis Masterlink for this recording.