Anyone who loves the music of the women's ensemble Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares will want to check out Mariana Sadovska's haunting song cycle for women's voices, The Rusalka Cycle: Songs between the Worlds. The cycle is organized around the Slavic mythology of the Rusalki, powerful nature-spirits of women who had died untimely deaths who were thought to control fertility, the seasons, and the weather. Sadovska uses texts from a variety of folklores, including Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Bosnian, Romanian, Russian, Georgian, and Croatian, as well as Corsican and early American. She uses some of the original folk music but makes new settings of many of the texts, so the work is not a collection of folk music, but an integrated performance piece steeped in the traditions of its sources. Sadovska's contributions blend seamlessly with the original material so that it's impossible for the non-specialist to know where one leaves off and the other begins. The sound is familiar to those who know le Mystère des Voix Bulgares -- intensely focused vocalism; the use of nasal tone color; a non-western, microtonal sounding tuning system; and tight harmonies with dissonances that don't resolve conventionally. Sadovska weaves solo sections and small ensembles into the choral fabric, and discreetly adds two cellos and percussion at some points. The effect is otherworldly, ethereal, feral, and immensely compelling. The work was conceived as a performance piece for the women's vocal ensemble Kitka, which performs it here with stunning intensity under the dramatic direction of Ellen Sebastian Chang; one can only imagine the impact the powerful music would have when combined with its theatrical component. The sound is clean, spacious, and natural sounding.
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