The story behind The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices is astonishing story in its own right, but the thing that makes jaws drop lowest is when you hear first-hand the staggering polyphony, dynamics, voice-control, and rhythmic and harmonic sophistication of the choir, here delivered by the 21st-Century daughters of the late-80s Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares phenomenon.
I suspect much of the audience gathered in the Kelvingrove in Glasgow’s vast, echoing main hall might have already experienced that moment, however, as the applause that greets the 18-piece ensemble of vocalists is absolutely enormous, like warmly greeting an old friend’s return after several years.
Those who are hearing it for the first time, however, will never forget it. From the familiar opening strains of the gentle Polegnala e Todora, through the rousing Svatba and Erghen Diado, the extraordinary vocal dexterity on show is quite amazing, with diaphonic duets layered over swelling ensemble chants, with familiar yelps, ululating, gossipy cackle and arc-ing rises and falls that are the hallmark of this troop. It’s as seemingly-freestyle or avant-garde as anything you’ll hear, while as harmonically sophisticated as any composition in the modernist classical tradition, and gives the lie to the uneducated notion that folk music lacks sophistication.
In the 1950s, the The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir recorded a host of traditional folk songs both with instrumentation and voice-only, for broadcast by Bulgaria’s Communist government. Twenty years later the Swiss musicologist Marcel Cellier released some of these recordings on his own record label as Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. In 1986, Ivo Watts-Russell – supremo of British record label 4AD, stable to Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil – was working with Goth guitar band Bauhaus, and was played a cassette of the album by Pete Murphy from the band. Knocked off his feet, Watts-Russell sought-out Cellier and gained a licence to release the recordings in the UK. The album received a typically-beautiful cover designed by Vaughan Oliver, and was released on 4AD, causing a generation of art students to look up from their copies of The Face and buy it in multitudes. I remember at the time George Harrison assuring a sceptical Terry Wogan on tv that it was really very good. The story has gone down as one of the most enlightened examples of music importation. A second release followed a year later, which won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording, and many of the choir visited the Assembly Rooms as part of the Edinburgh International Festival – a date which I remember well – the singers no doubt as surprised at the level of interest as the audience were at what they were witnessing.
Since then, the choir has performed more than 1,500 concerts outside Bulgaria in some of the most prestigious venues in the world, with some members having also worked with leading artists such as Kate Bush and U2, while in this century the choir’s sound has been sampled and remixed by Drake, FKA Twigs and many others.
Preceding the Bulgarians was the internationally-acclaimed American vocal group Windborne, known for their arrangements showcasing polyphonic vocal music from diverse cultures. Pitch-perfect, and with the luxury of extra colour that four-part harmonies afford, they have garnered acclaim for their recordings and highly-educative performances, entertaining with stories about the music and its traditions. Their latest album, To Warm the Winter Hearth, was the fifth most successful crowdfunded album ever. One striking, if uncomfortable, aspect of tonight’s performance – as they breathe new life into old songs from movements for people’s rights – is the stark realisation that traditional music’s link to protest and social activism is as strong today as ever in the never-ending struggle for social justice.
The concert was opened by the Glasgow Chamber Choir, and featured the premiere of a new choral adaptation of Gaelic texts from the Carmina Gadelica collection of hymns and incantations, composed by Norman Nicholson, organist at St John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Oban. The texts were gathered by Alexander Carmichael and first published in 1900. It was great to see Nicholson appear alongside the Choir’s musical director Michael Bawtree to take the applause that followed a pristine rendition of the mature and complex piece.
