Baltic Tides - Music for the piano by Baltic female composers

 

Yes, the recent Grammy Awards were dominated by charismatic female stars and songwriters of popular music. Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish... Why do I mention them on a classical music post ? 

The few acknowledged female composers of 'classical' music were rather more powerful in the days before social media but now they remain willfully neglected or forgotten by the 'serious' music establishment.  Time for a change and rehabilitation! Music is a universal magic dust after all ....

My interest and fascination with female composers first began when I visited Sanssouci Palace (1745-1747) in Potsdam some years ago while researching the biography of Edward Cahill (1885-1975), a glamorous but neglected Australian concert pianist. 

'Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.'

Victor Hugo

In my reviews I always try to apply the E.M. Forster directive 'Only Connect'. This often takes me down illuminating paths of learning, history, literature and art which together enhances music I am unfamiliar with. Thomas Mann had a lifelong passion for the Baltic ocean and wrote about it often.

'We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader's recollections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk and walk, and you never get back home on time, because you are lost to time and it to you. O sea – we sit here telling our story far from you, but our eyes and heart turn towards you now, and we explicitly invoke you, speak your name aloud, making you as present as you constantly have been, are, always will be, in our silent thoughts… Blustering wasteland, spanned by pale, bright gray, drenched with a dry, salty tang that clings to our lips. We walk and walk along the light springy beach strewn with seaweed and tiny shells, our ears swathed by the wind, by the great, ample, mild wind that passes freely through space, unencumbered and without malice, filling our heads with a gentle numbness – we wander, wander and watch the roiling sea send tongues of onrushing foam to lick our feet and fall back again. The surf seethes, wave upon silken wave crashes with a bright thud against the level beach – here, there, on sandbars further out. And the universal turmoil, the tenderly booming din closes our ears against every other voice in the world. Profound contentment, knowing forgetfulness. Sheltered in eternity, let us close our eyes.'

Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain 

'The sea and music formed an ideal emotional conjunction for ever. Thomas Mann always had a kind of inner sea within him.' 

Thomas Mann

'The sea,' as Thomas Mann once said himself, 'its rhythm, its musical transcendence is in some way present everywhere in my books, even when – as is often enough the case – the talk is not expressly of the sea'

'The sea! Infinity! My love of the sea, whose immense simplicity I have always preferred to the challenging multifariousness of the mountains, is as old as my love of sleep.'

'There is the sea, the Baltic, which the boy sighted for the first time in Travemünde, the Travemünde of forty years ago with the old Biedermeier-style Kurhaus, the Swiss chalets and the concert hall'. Where he heard orchestral music for the first time in his life, where the sea and the music formed an ideal emotional conjunction for him, which would shape the rest of his life.

[Quotations from MAN OF THE SEA Thomas Mann and the Love of His Life by Volker Weidermann Translated by Ruth Martin © 2023 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG]

Bathed in Amber, the substance of the sun
Sunset at Palanga on the Baltic coast of Lithuania

Here is a case in point. 

Lūcija GARŪTA (1902–1977) and  Ester MÄGI (1922–2021) 

Both composers are women, at the time and even in modern days female creatives are too often denied serious consideration of creative work by most nations. Additionally they are from the Baltic and accomplished musicians, scarcely considered household names in the world of classical music. 

Setting out on an exploration of Baltic compositions and for that matter detailed knowledge of Baltic culture and history is a journey significantly worth taking particularly now when under threat of war.

Do read this link if you are permitted

 https://app.box.com/s/hffj1n8mgy7edh0qdxuprsyuzxtmearw

I found all the music on this disc impressive, inspiring and on occasion deeply moving and meditative. The Polish pianist Eva Maria Doroszkowska has clearly studied this music closely, has a Baltic Slavic 'feel' for the compositions and in essence produces a remarkable disc which I can recommend wholeheartedly to explore significantly new musical territory. 

Her notes written to accompany the CD are extremely fluent, stylish, meticulously researched and illuminating for those of us uneasy with Baltic historiography. My area of specialty is the South Pacific, a steep contrast with the Baltic in so many ways but oceanic fantasies and imagination have many characteristics in common.

Baltic as opposed to Slavic culture is fascinating in its pagan elements. The Curonian Spit is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and I can quite see why with its magnificent sand dunes and kilometers of deserted beaches. I learned so much about that glorious and fascinating resin, amber, 'the substance of the sun' that trapped insects 40 million years ago. 

At the charming town of Nida Thomas Mann built a summer house and wrote the masterpiece 'Joseph and His Brothers' - an inspired writer's choice of location but then he loved the Baltic shore with a passion.

https://www.visitneringa.com/en/explore-neringa/museums/thomas-mann-memorial-museum-16209.html

Do read again concerning the background to this music and consider after listening a visit to the Baltic States before.....

This remarkable music illustrates emotions and music compositional inspiration stemming from such passionate nationalist history as appears below, something  that I wrote on my return from Lithuania:

Along the Amber Shore

‘A mighty thunderstorm broke over the remote village of Perloja. Bolts of lightning fitfully illuminated the stern features and powerful armoured chest of the Grand Duke, sword drawn and cape thrust over one shoulder. The village had withstood the Northern Crusades in 1378 and the plague of 1710. High on a burgundy-coloured plinth strengthened with steel railway ties to foil its destruction, the stone guest gazed beyond a legendary horizon above an inscription in a language related to Sanskrit “Vytautas the Great! You are alive for as long as there is at least one Lithuanian”. Fortified by domestic military units under the protection of its emblem, a bison with golden hooves and horns surmounted by a Christian cross, the villagers fought Poles and Bolsheviks. The fiercely independent settlement declared its own Republic and joined partisans to battle the Soviets. A decidedly cinematic scene saw me standing in a tempest beneath that monumental effigy of the last great ruler of Lithuania.’

I was there during the 1000 year independence celebrations and the intense nationalism was expressed in marvellous dancing in full folk costume (folklore is massively important in Lithuania) and massed choirs - a unique spectacle in Europe. The flaxen-haired Lithuanian girls I saw everywhere in Vilnius are  uniquely beautiful. 

That excursion was a wonderful and insightful surprise - a European country mercifully lacking any mass tourist development. Palanga is a discriminating seaside choice for those tired of fighting the European summer hordes of July and August flooding the Mediterranean.

This unique disc with a premiere performance  can be obtained from :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Baltic-Tides-Eva-Maria-Doroszkowska/dp/B0DXQCD94L

This link to another Polish  'sister' pianist may be helpful. The 'Contrarious Moods of Men' - Review of the CD 'Female Power' by the Polish pianist Anna Lipiak

https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5939697012012959902/2136173306826182486?hl=en-GB