Songs For Lada - To The New World

Album review

This release appears in the Naxos label's American Classics series, but the main attraction, Songs for Lada (the composer's daughter, not the Soviet car), was composed between 1988 and 1991, before composer Alla Borzova came to the U.S., and mostly while her native Belarus was still part of the Soviet Union. No matter. It's an appealing piece, based on children's folklore from Belarus, that has been successfully performed in both the former Soviet Union and the U.S. The texts, written or adapted mostly by the composer herself, have a narrative quality; with spoken or sung adult female vocal solos (one performing in folk style) played off against a children's choir and an orchestra that includes Russian bagpipes and other ethnic instruments. The composer specifies conventional substitutes for these, but to their credit conductor Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra do not use these, instead unearthing players of the originals, presumably from Michigan's large Eastern European community. The orchestra gets into the spirit of the work, and there are good immigrant soloists, but the real stars are the members of the unheralded Michigan State University Children's Choir, most of them presumably singing in an unfamiliar language. They yield nothing to much more famous groups in terms of pitch precision and rhythmic ensemble. The album ends with To the New World, a genuinely American work by Borzova that depicts a group of immigrants (including Irish), each with their own music; the traditions come together at the end in an American melting pot that includes jazz. It's a simple concept, but an original one, and as with Songs for Lada it's accessible without being in any way hackneyed or conventional. Anyone who has followed concert music in a major American metropolitan area these days knows just how much of it is accomplished by musicians with roots in the former East Bloc, and with strong engineering in Detroit's marvelously warm Orchestra Hall, this album offers a fine taste of that scene.
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