Zibuokle Martinaityte

ALETHEIA - Choral Works

English notes enclosed 

Ondine’s third album devoted to the music of Lithuanian-American composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973) focuses on her music for unaccompanied chorus. On this album four of her works are performed by the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Klava.

Growing up in Soviet Union during a time when people were often afraid to speak openly, Martinaitytė realized quite early in her life that music was a medium where she could freely express herself without any kind of self-censoring. Despite avoiding language or text, the four choral works featured herein are all extremely expressive and deeply emotional and focusing on the vast timbral possibilities of human voices. Martinaitytė began composing the first work on this album, Aletheia (2022), just as Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine. Her Ululations (2023) is as an audible, ritualistic expression of mourning written in the same way “owls are awake at night ululating in the forest, the mourning women whose men of the family are at war fighting and dying or who have lost their loved ones, are wailing their sorrows out loud” (Zibuokle Martinaityte). Chant des Voyelles is the name of one of Lithuanian-born French-American cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz’s iconic bronzes at the John D. Rockefeller Estate’s art collection. Martinaitytė wrote her Chants de Voyelles based on vowels while being artist-in-residence at the Estate’s Pocantico Center. The composer aimed for a more direct form of communication that goes beyond words and languages and supersedes them. “Vowels are almost the very first sounds we make when we attempt to speak as babies,” Martinaitytė explains. Final work of the album, The Blue of Distance, is a much earlier work dating from 2010. Here also, although the work was originally inspired by a written text, the vocal part contains no sung lyrics.

The Latvian Radio Choir (LRC) ranks among the top professional chamber choirs in Europe and its refined taste for musical material, fineness of expression and vocal of unbelievably immense compass have charted it as a noted brand on the world map. The repertoire of LRC ranges from the Renaissance music to the most sophisticated scores by modern composers; and it could be described as a sound laboratory – the singers explore their skills by turning to the mysteries of traditional singing, as well as to the art of quartertone and overtone singing and other sound production techniques. The choir has established a new understanding of the possibilities of a human voice; one could also say that the choir is the creator of a new choral paradigm: every singer is a distinct individual with his or her own vocal signature and roles in performances. The choir’s album of John Cage choral works won a Gramophone award in 2023.

Sigvards Kļava is one of the most outstanding Latvian conductors, also a professor of conducting and producer, music director of the Latvian Radio Choir since 1992. As a result of Sigvards Klava’s steady efforts, the Latvian Radio Choir has become an internationally recognized, vocally distinctive collective, where each singer possesses a creative individuality. Under Sigvards’ guidance, the choir has recorded a number of choral works by little known or completely forgotten composers of the past, as well as formed a friendly collaboration with a number of notable Latvian composers. Sigvards Klava is a professor at the Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music. Klava is a multiple winner of the Latvian Great Music Award.