Virko Baley

A Journey After Loves

UCMF 2020 · Fifty Years of Ukrainian Culture · Feb 28 · Vocal

Dominik Belavy, baritone; Eric Sedgwick, piano

Performed by Dominik Belavy (Baritone), Eric Sedgwick (Piano)

A Journey After Loves by Virko Baley is a setting of a remarkable poetic pilgrimage by Bohdan Boychuk. It is also a somber, wintry journey that casts a deep shadow on our need for, and ability to, love — or rather, perhaps, our expectations of love. “There are a few song cycles that made a profound impression on me, but none more than Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Vanished. I heard it for the first time around 1959, and its memory never left me. Each is a miniature, and if I may be allowed a mixed metaphor, a pearl in a necklace of a mesmerizing emotional journey. This cycle (A Journey After Loves, my first) is written in Janáček’s memory. Thus, to a certain extent, my setting reflects the original Ukrainian verses, in that I wanted the music to resonate a Slavic soundscape in the English language. I also decided that all eight songs would be one continuous whole, with the piano often taking on the role of a guide, leading the singer from one verse to the next. The cycle became a long monologue in eight parts.” A number of sound links connect the songs: the “bebung,” a two-note phrase in which the first note is done with a slight accent and the second sounds as its immediate echo (Nos. 2 and 8); the triad (Nos. 5, 6 and 8); variation on the same rhythmic pattern (Nos. 1 and 8); modulatory schemes and many other cross-references. In the words of Mark Rudman, Boychuk’s are poems “of quick entrances and quick exits… some of them read like folk poetry filtered through a modernist lens… a distinctive voice, which is as lyrical as it is bleak, as haunted as it is isolated.” A Journey After Loves was commissioned by Dr. W. Howard Hoffman for Isabelle Emerson in honor of her birthday.

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Nocturnal No. 5 “In the Grove”

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 1980 · Piano

Performed by Laura Spitzer (Piano)

Nocturnal No. 5 was written in 1980 for Laura Spitzer, who premiered it in abridged form in 1985 at Merkin Hall; UCMF 2024 presents the New York premiere of the entire work. A progression of four musical lines in non-imitative polyphony — a bird-like top voice, a cantilena, a walking bass, and clipped “bebung” chords with plucked or stroked strings — creates a woven texture heard as a walk through the forest at night. Over the span of the piece the increasingly agitated lines infect one another until they erupt into a brief chaos of forearm clusters, then return to the soft opening like ashes settling after an explosion. Baley traced the idea to the fifteenth-century polytextual motet and to Akutagawa’s story In a Grove (the basis for Kurosawa’s Rashomon), a killing told by four witnesses; in the music it becomes a gradual transformation of pitches into clusters — “Cluster is where the pitches go to die,” as his friend Valentyn Sylvestrov once said. (Notes by Laura Spitzer.)

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Soliloquies and Dialogs (Without Words)

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 2023–2024 · Chamber · World premiere

World premiere; based on the opera Holodomor (Red Earth. Hunger)

Performed by Timothy Hoft (Piano), Anastasia Petanova (Flute)

A world premiere. Soliloquies and Dialogs is a paraphrase/transcription for flute and piano of three scenes from Baley’s opera Holodomor, about the artificial famine engineered by Stalin in Ukraine in 1932–33, which took the lives of some five million mostly peasant-farmers. The libretto — by poet Bohdan Boychuk, who had written a play, “Holod” (“Hunger”), subtitled “Fated to Love” — centres on a nameless Woman with a new-born baby and a Man; strangers who meet, by the end the Man sacrifices himself to save the life of the baby. The Prelude (“Shadows of Remembrance”) is based on the Woman’s aria; the “Dances of the Living Shadows” is an extended scene in which the Woman and Man converse and argue; the Postlude is “Memories of the Departed.”

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Nocturnal No. 7 “Introitus”

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 1990 · Piano

Performed by Timothy Hoft (Piano)

Baley’s most significant solo piano works are his seven Nocturnals, written over five decades; No. 7, “Introitus,” dates from 2013–14, when Baley was in his 70s. A tone poem that seems to belong to some primordial stream of being — a recollection of the origin of musical sound, now lost to memory — its opening loosely evokes early-Renaissance polytextual motets before a più mosso section dominated by détaché septuplet figures. The ending is improvisatory, mysterious and reflective; in a late arioso the melodic line quotes “Zhuravli” (“The Cranes: Listen, brother mine”), a lament for the dead of World War I published in Berlin in 1922, before the work settles into a simple choral phrase repeated three times, a kind of “pianist’s Amen.” Both tonal and atonal, academic and folklorish, it was premiered by Timothy Hoft in 2014. (Notes by Timothy Hoft.)

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From Dreamtime

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 1993–1995 · Chamber

Performed by Ginevra Petrucci (Flute), Gleb Kanasevich (Clarinet), Yuliya Basis (Piano), Andrii Didorenko (Violin), Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello), Sean Statser (Percussion), James Baker (Conductor)

Dreamtime — the aboriginal name for the time in which creation took place, at once past and present — took Baley several years to complete. “It’s a huge piece,” he says, “I don’t know what made me do it.” Scored for seven musicians, it requires a small arsenal of percussion and is rendered nearly orchestral by instruments doubling and echoing one another, with recurring “rhythms of doom” pairing piano and percussion. UCMF 2024 presents three movements: “Adam’s Apple,” a grotesque dance whose opening hockets recall the Kolomyika, plunging through major and minor seconds in a shortened sonata-allegro; “Tears,” a two-part madrigal with a fluctuating drone over funeral-march chords, with eight water goblets entering at the close; and “The Hour of the Wolf,” inspired by the Ingmar Bergman film, in which prepared piano and an exotic, serpentine flute-and-violin melody grow out of two chords over obscurely evocative, continually interlocking rhythms. (Notes by John Schaefer.)

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Treny IV

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 1990 · Vocal

Performed by Olga Pasichnyk (Soprano), Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello), Julia Henderson (Cello)

“Treny IV,” Baley states, “is the point to which the previous three parts were leading — the work’s emotional epicenter and its final resolution.” Here at last the soprano appears, to give words to the voice crying out in the desert. Baley set excerpts of the original Polish text of Jan Kochanowski’s cycle of laments (Treny). The movement opens with a wordless Introitus in which the soprano hums a lyrical vocalise; the two cellos, in scordatura tuning, join only for the last seconds. Throughout, voice and cellos skirt the work’s two main themes; only in the last phrase does the soprano sing the Treny motif in its bare minor-second/perfect-fifth form, and the work returns to a realm beyond words as the Lamento theme fades into emptiness — part of Baley’s meditation on the loss of three people close to him.

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From Uniforms of Snow: No. 10 Interlude 2: Tren

UCMF 2024 · Virko Baley at 85 · Mar 29 · 2002–2003 · Chamber

Performed by Ginevra Petrucci (Flute), Gleb Kanasevich (Clarinet), Andrii Didorenko (Violin), Iryna Kit (Violin), Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello), Julia Henderson (Cello), Yuliya Basis (Piano), Sean Statser (Percussion), Virko Baley (Conductor)

Uniforms of Snow is part of Baley’s ongoing project The Emily Dickinson Songbook, structured — “discovered intuitively,” he says — as an overture, songs, instrumental interludes and a final vocalise. The Postludium heard here, No. 10, Interlude 2 (“Tren”), is a simple setting for oboe, harp and strings that quotes an earlier musical meditation on loss, grief and death from Baley’s Treny IV, and doubles as a prelude to the Epilogue, “Little Cousins,” a setting of the last words Emily Dickinson wrote before she died.

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