Žibuokė Martinaitytė | ALETHEIA CHORAL WORKS

Performers:

Latvian Radio Choir
Sigvards Kļava - conductor

Recorded 2024

Release date 01.11.2024

Recording company ONDINE

 

Content:

Composer - Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973)

1 ALETHEIA (2022)

2 Chant des Voyelles (2018)

3 Ululations (2023)

4 The Blue of Distance (2010)

 

Description:

Ondine’s third album devoted to the music of Lithuanian-American composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973) focuses on her music for unaccompanied chorus. On this album four of her works are performed by the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Klava.

Growing up in Soviet Union during a time when people were often afraid to speak openly, Martinaitytė realized quite early in her life that music was a medium where she could freely express herself without any kind of self-censoring. Despite avoiding language or text, the four choral works featured herein are all extremely expressive and deeply emotional and focusing on the vast timbral possibilities of human voices. Martinaitytė began composing the first work on this album, Aletheia (2022), just as Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine. Her Ululations (2023) is as an audible, ritualistic expression of mourning written in the same way “owls are awake at night ululating in the forest, the mourning women whose men of the family are at war fighting and dying or who have lost their loved ones, are wailing their sorrows out loud” (Zibuokle Martinaityte). Chant des Voyelles is the name of one of Lithuanian-born French-American cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz’s iconic bronzes at the John D. Rockefeller Estate’s art collection. Martinaitytė wrote her Chants de Voyelles based on vowels while being artist-in-residence at the Estate’s Pocantico Center. The composer aimed for a more direct form of communication that goes beyond words and languages and supersedes them. “Vowels are almost the very first sounds we make when we attempt to speak as babies,” Martinaitytė explains. Final work of the album, The Blue of Distance, is a much earlier work dating from 2010. Here also, although the work was originally inspired by a written text, the vocal part contains no sung lyrics.