Martin Smolka

Three choral works by the Czech composer Martin Smolka, sung by the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart under Marcus Creed. Imitation of real sounds, formal simplicity, altered intonation and repetition run through all three. Sea surges, whistling male voices and ebbing choral waves suggest an illusion for an instant, then dissolve into pure choral sound.

Smolka was born in Prague in 1959. He studied composition with Jiří Pauer and Ctirad Kohoutek at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts, and privately with Marek Kopelent. In 1983 he co-founded Ensemble Agon, which he led as artistic director and pianist until 1998. He burst onto the international scene at Donaueschingen in 1992 with magically realistic sounds. The work in question was Rain, a window, roofs, chimneys, pigeons and so… and railway-bridges, too, premiered there on 18 October 1992. Percussionist Martin Homann joins the choir in Walden. This is a production of Südwestrundfunk, supported by the Friends of the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart.

Poema de balcones (2008), for two mixed choirs, draws on just three lines from Federico García Lorca's Romancero gitano. The words are hardly understandable, but one hears the sea slowly dancing across the beach, with a rolling R, in the long overlapping waves of the two choirs. Walden, the Distiller of Celestial Dews (2000), for mixed choir and percussion on a text by Henry David Thoreau, is the longest piece at 21 minutes. Słone i smutne (Salt and Sadness, 2006) sets a poem about love and remembrance written in the late 1940s by the Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz. Smolka does not follow the text in a line. He picks out single words and fragments of sentences and keeps recombining them.

It is surprising that the avant-garde audience accepted such illustrative music, but it came across as different and conveyed with simple charm. In his "Manifesto of a Re-tuned Composer" Smolka asks for no more musical revolutions and no more new music, but rather strange music. His interest in detuned instruments, unconventional sound sources and the harmonic world of Harry Partch belongs to the same search.

CD, Wergo WER 7332 2, released in 2016.