Tabakova: Sun Triptych BBC Concert Orchestra & Dobrinka Tabakova

• Dobrinka Tabakova (b. 1980): Whispered Lullaby:
• 1 Tabakova: Whispered Lullaby 04:52
• Suite in Jazz Style:
• 2 Tabakova: Suite in Jazz Style: I. Talk 04:40
• 3 Tabakova: Suite in Jazz Style: II. Nocturnal 06:03
• 4 Tabakova: Suite in Jazz Style: III. Dance 04:34
• Fantasy Homage to Schubert:
• 5 Tabakova: Fantasy Homage to Schubert 14:30
• Organum Light:
• 6 Tabakova: Organum Light 05:18
• Spinning a Yarn:
• 7 Tabakova: Spinning a Yarn 06:39
• Sun Triptych:
• 8 Tabakova: Sun Triptych: I. Dawn 07:53
• 9 Tabakova: Sun Triptych: II. Day 04:28
• 10 Tabakova: Sun Triptych: III. Dusk 07:59
• Total Runtime 01:06:56

Info for Tabakova: Sun Triptych

Dobrinka Tabakova’s ECM New Series debut, String Paths, made an immediate impact on its release in 2013. The Washington Times hailed it as an “exciting, deeply moving, original and triumphant” recording, while The Strad praised its “glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures.” Music from String Paths was incorporated in Jean-Luc Godard’s films Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) and Le livre d’image (The Image Book), and the album received a Grammy nomination.

The British-Bulgarian composer’s new album, again produced by Manfred Eicher, brings back some of the String Paths cast, including close associates violist Maxim Rysanov, violinist Roman Mints and cellist Kristine Blaumane. Friends and colleagues since conservatory days at the Guildhall School, all now leading soloists in their own right, they have grown up with the expressive language and colours of Tabakova’s music and are among its ideal interpreters.

In addition, the BBC Concert Orchestra, with whom she held the position of Composer-in- Residence from 2017 to 2022, presents her works Sun Triptych and Fantasy Homage to Schubert. In the album’s musical constellation, these works have a central role, with the more chamber-like pieces – including Whispered Lullaby, the Suite in Jazz Style and Spinning a Yarn – surrounding or connecting them, “growing out of this nebulous, still world, and melting back into it,” as Tabakova says.

Two pieces for viola and piano open the album: Whispered Lullaby is a gentle, yearning song, originally composed for a children’s opera, Midsummer Magic. The Suite in Jazz Style, an imaginative chamber meditation on jazz gestures, atmospheres and textures, is a successor to the Suite in Old Style on String Paths, also written for the wide ranging skills of violist Maxim Rysakov.

Spinning a Yarn, a piece with a touching, archaic folk-like quality, features Roman Mints on both violin and hurdy-gurdy, “a beautiful, interesting - and capricious! - instrument. To have that link to a folkloric past is also very important to me.” As the Washington Times remarked: “Tabakova may be using the musical materials of tradition, but through them she has broken new paths”

The Fantasy Homage to Schubert recontextualizes Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major, originally for violin and piano, resetting its opening melody “in a completely transfigured environment,” and directing it heavenward. Conjuring images of slowly turning planets, Tabakova paints a picture of “floating in space, free of gravity – comets and celestial bodies passing by. And, as the Schubert melody is heard for the first time, we catch a first glimpse of Planet Earth.”

The radiant Sun Triptych evokes the changing play of light on the natural world over the course of the day. Dobrinka Tabakova: “The solace I find in nature permeates this work. The first movement builds up gently, ascending lines in the solos, increasingly denser and richer chords in the

strings...The sustained textures of the first movement become hazy tremolos in the second movement, ‘Day’, as the shimmering of the strings suggest the buzzing of insects and the heat haze when the sun is at its strongest. In the final movement, a retrograde of some of the gestures in the first movement is applied to bring the close of the journey with ‘Dusk.’”

Organum Light was written in response to a commission from vocal group Opus Anglicanum; since the piece drew inspiration from the polyphonic viol consort works of Gibbons and Purcell, transferring the music to a string ensemble was, Tabakova notes, a very natural step.

Maxim Rysanov, viola
Dasol Kim, piano
Roman Mints, violin, Hurdy Gurdy
Kristina Blaumane, violoncello
BBC Concert Orchestra
Dobrinka Tabakova, conductor

Dobrinka Tabakova
is a composer of ‘exciting, deeply moving’ music (Washington Times), with ‘glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures [which] convey a huge emotional depth’ (The Strad). She has been commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, BBC Radio 3 and the European Broadcasting Union. Her debut profile album String Paths, on ECM Records, was nominated for a Grammy in 2014. In 2017 she was appointed composer-in-residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra. An album of her orchestral works, recorded by the Halle Orchestra is released in October 2023.

Born in the historic town of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Tabakova has lived in London since 1991, graduating from the Guildhall School of Music, and obtaining a PhD from King’s College London. Her “riveting, piercingly beautiful and frequently radiant” music (Huffpost Arts & Culture) has featured in films (Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage), dance (Sydney Dance Company, San Francisco Ballet, Theater St.Gallen) and has been programmed at festivals across Europe and the US including: the BBC Proms (UK), Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), Bang on a Can (USA), World Sun Songs (Latvia) and Dark Music Days (Iceland). Tabakova has been resident composer at the Davos Summer Festival in Switzerland and Truro Cathedral, Cornwall (UK), as well as with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Swan (Stratford, UK).

Among prizes for her work are the prize for an anthem for Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee and First Prize and Medallion at the Sorel Choral Composition Contest in New York. Significant projects include Immortal Shakespeare, a cantata commemorating Shakespeare's 400th anniversary in 2016, the multi-commissioned double piano concerto Together Remember to Dance and the choir and strings work Centuries of Meditations for the Three Choirs Festival. Tabakova’s second album, devoted to her choral music and performed by the Truro Cathedral Choir with the BBCCO, was released by Regent Records, receiving a 2019 Gramophone Magazine Critics’ Choice. In 2021, Dobrinka Tabakova completed her orchestral Earth Suite for the BBC Concert Orchestra and the violin concerto The Patience of Trees for the Manchester International Festival. In 2022, she was named The Halle Orchestra's artist in association.

Forthcoming projects include a new album and premieres with The Halle Оrchestra, an extensive tour of the UK’s great cathedrals with vocal ensemble The Sixteen, celebrating William Byrd's 400th anniversary with two new commissions from Tabakova, as well as a follow-up ECM Records album.

… the luminous “Syng, Hevin Imperiall” ... closed in a mood of gorgeous calm after a gauzily beautiful opening…’ - New York Times

‘The term "avantgarde" is changing and Dobrinka is one of those lending it a new meaning. Her credo… consists of a simple basic idea: That something new can always be found, even in the most familiar places. Her music, therefore, sets out to explore this zone of familiarity and the unknown, never drawing any borders…’ - Tobias Fischer, music writer and broadcaster

Booklet for Tabakova: Sun Triptych