Croatian pianist Vedrana Subotic has organized a series of five folk songs from the ethnic regions of the former Yugoslavia: Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Croatia: songs of lament, love and loss, beauty, death, and family life. She complements the cycle with the Sonata in B Minor (1853) of Franz Liszt, with its own debts to Hungarian gypsy modes and scales, Balkan colors, and its dramatic conflict of light and dark that lends its title “Chiaroscuro,” to the collection.
Djelem, Djelem (I went, I went) is an old, Serbian melody that became in 1971 the Romani people’s national anthem as a tribute to their suffering at Nazi hands during WW II. The vocal lines combine jazzy, instrumental variations that typify a Balkan ensemble that includes cimbalom, fiddle, drums and clarinet. Starting slowly, the piece picks up speed and a sense of ragtime improvisation.
Kad Ja Podjoh Na Bembasu (When I went to Bembasa) is a Sevdah, a sad love song of romantic loss. The song’s locale is a dam in Sarajevo that stood from 1462-1875. A young man courts an Islamic woman, using a white lamb as a pretext. When he fails to meet her in the evening, he discovers the next day she is married to another man. The piece plays as an extended nocturne.
Makedonsko Devojce (Macedonian Girl) demand complicated metric patterns, like 7/16, a lilted melody with a lyrical refrain. The percussive staccatos suggest Balkan instruments, even the bagpipe. Those familiar with Magyar folk music will hear similarities to Bartok’s modal, angularly lyric tunes. The song celebrates the peerless beauty of the Macedonian girl.
Jos ne svice rujna Zora (Crimson dawn has not yet broken) is a Montenegro song from 1833. Set in verse form, the song is a patriotic lament for the cost of rebellion against the Turkish Empire. The delicate choral structure is interrupted late by a sense of emotional urgency and lingering pain. Even the rebirth in Nature fails to provide solace, the song ending on a minor-key dissonance.
Mujo kuje konja Po Mjesecu (Mujo shoes his horse under the Moonlight), another Bosnian Sevdah, involves a dialogue, a display of vocal virtuosity in layered, modal scales. Mujo prepares his horse for a perilous romantic tryst, but his mother chides him for his amorous recklessness. The choppy, broken rhythms and swirling arpeggios against Mujo’s meek urgings provides a mordant humor reminiscent of moments in Mussorgsky.
Liszt: Sonata in B Minor has often been called “Beethoven’s 33rd Sonata.” Its structure taken from Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy; it evolves in one continuous movement on themes established early and worked cyclically in variation. The music subdivides into four sections, typical of a conventional sonata. Pianist Subotic sees Liszt’s grand scheme as an expression of a Balkan narrative sensibility, a drama of light and dark, of passionate ecstasies that embrace every aspect of keyboard technique, including – as in Schubert – a massive fugal section before the demonic coda. The writing clearly demands an “orchestral” sense of the piano’s capacity for dramatic colors.