Zebeljan: Chamber Music

Aneta, Ilic, Brodsky Quartet, Dohr, Stefan, Lluna, Joan-Enric

CPO 777994

Isidora Žebeljan currently ranks as one of Serbia’s most successful composers. She gained international notice with her opera Zora D. composed as a commissioned work for London’s Genesis Foundation. Numerous commissions from renowned ensembles, institutions, and festivals have followed, and with her more than thirty scores for the leading Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin theaters she has also established herself as a stage composer. Moreover, she has contributed to the production of numerous soundtracks. Isidora Žebeljan maintains a very special relationship with the Brodsky Quartet, which has performed her ensemble oeuvre in its entirety. She has composed some pieces especially for this ensemble, which on the present recording also fulfills an outstanding function. For Isidora Žebeljan the folk music tradition naturally forms a central point of departure from which, however, she goes on to create a musical world all of her own. Her new and unique personal form of expression is reflected in works such as the Polomka Quartet or the Lada Songs. The polomka is one of the most popular dances in eastern Serbia. The quartet was inspired by the impressions gathered by the composer as a spectator. She transformed these impressions into the idea of the dance of an imaginary people in a region removed from the real world. She composed the New Songs of Lada (2006-11) after verses by anonymous Vojvodina poets contained in the anthology Urban Serbian Poetry of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Lada is the old Slavic deity of love and the spring. »Always highly suspenseful. An artist full of thrilling inventions.

CD x 1

CPO

07.10.15

761203799428