Zibuokle Martinaityte: Aletheia - Choral Works

Description

Ondine's third album devoted to the music of Lithuanian-American composer Zibuokle Martinaityte (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, Martinaityte 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. Martinaityte 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. Martinaityte 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," Martinaityte 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.