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Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares

The human voice raised in song is far more eloquent than when it speaks.

From their knowledge of this profund verity, the Bulgarian people place the art of song at the pinnacle of artistic expression. Their genius in this field - fruit of a thousand year - long story of tears and suffering - draws his nourishment from roots than go back to another world: Byzantium. And even further back, the furthest tips of these roots are lost in the obscure and ancient civilization of the Thracian's a people famous in their time for their musical prowess. The thousand year-long tradition of Bulgarian songs suffered from all the tribulations of a history marred in blood - to be followed by the nightmare of five centuries under the Ottoman yoke. And so their vocal art, the only free expression open to the Bulgarian people, has been coloured, layered, down the ages. Monodic in its beginnings, then strangely diaphonic, Bulgarian song developed his own polyphony which encountered Western harmony in the 20th century.

So it is that a wonderful synthesis is offered to today music-lovers: elements of a fabulous archaism, of Byzantine liturgy, of popular song, of epic recitals, heroic sagas, laments... All fused into veritable jewels.

These jewels are placed harmoniously in their setting by men of great taste: Krassimir Kyurkchiiski, Philip Koutev, Gueorgui Mintchev, Alexandre Iossifov, Stefan Moutafchev, Nikolai Kaufman. And yet, in addition to previously unheard melodic, rythmic and harmonic delights, there is more: the timbre! The sonorous timbre characteristic of the open, vibrato-free voices of young Bulgarian country girls. For it is from the villages, not from the schools of music, that the choirmasters from Sofia recruit the vocal cords needed for the A Capella choirs. For whether it be the mountainous regions of Macedonia, Rodopes, Pirin, or the Thracian plain, Shopsko, or Dobroudja on the shores of the Black Sea, song is held everywhere to be a sacred tradition, handed down from genaration to generation. With staggering ease, these daugthers of the earth achieve and surpass the habitual limits taught in our schools of music.

What they preserve, they learned in their villages: melisma, grace-notes, trills, plus a strong predilection for the second as a diaphonic interval.

The beauty of perfection!

The perfection of beauty!

It is somewhere between these two exclamations that you must seek...

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