VA - Yassen Vodenitcharov: The Voynich Manuscript (2021)

The works included in the new CD of the composer Yassen Vodenitcharov will be appreciated by listeners who are gifted with a specific imagination. By listening to his music, they can “travel” through time, feel the taste of earlier epochs, transcribe their philosophical, literary and historical knowledge into impulses of another nature – into sound impulses that exert their sensitivity with a new, exciting perspective. All this is provoked by Vodenitcharov’s music, incorporated in this release.

The Voynich Manuscript has been inspired by a really existing mystery manuscript, rediscovered by the American bibliophile Wilfrid Voynich with the Jesuits of the Italian town Frascati. This is a work for mezzo-soprano and a consort of violas da gamba; with its patinated timbres it tunes the senses to a fleeting mystique, captured, extracted, encrypted in the musical language of the composer.

Within the same course, but in the zone of traditional cultures and rituals, is the piece Calls and Songs in Trio, a work, regarding which the French musicologist Dominique Druhen wrote: “Three or four centuries ago, the composers, followers and defenders of the most colourful counterpoint, would not have expressed themselves in another way. In fact, the style of Yassen Vodenitcharov preserves the achievements of this great tradition, which affirms the musical and humanistic concepts…”

Sound Shadows ‘unites’ sounds which are both unstable and barely perceptible, as well as powerful sound masses where each individual part acquires meaning only if it is integrated into an overall movement.

The conversation with the past continues also in ...Pueritiae Memoriam... (Childhood Memory), which completes the programme in this compact disc. Here the memory of the artist brings us closer to such artists and composers as the Venezuelan artist Jésus Soto, Rubens, Bach and Franco Donatoni. In this work also Vodenitcharov does not iconize the subjects of his memorable choice but presents them in a modern perspective via the tools of his musical language.