* The album will be released on November 21*
This music by Vancouverite Anna Pidgorna is unclassifiable, except as a hybrid form of genres and influences, primarily Ukrainian folklore and contemporary classical music. Ms. Pidgorna is of Ukrainian origin. After studying composition at Princeton, she took an initiatory journey to her family’s country, and from it gained a powerful connection with the root music of that country. Since then, she, who had not studied singing, began to practice this art. The result is a completely original amalgam between a hybrid vocal style, between the popular and the lyrical, and a music that is in a kind of equal temperament of the style, the folk inflections with the sonorous and coloristic outbursts of learnt avant-garde music. In addition, she distorts her language to create a new one whose vowels, she says, have the best effect “in her mouth.”
The main quality of these scores (four of a vocal nature and two purely instrumental, serving as transitions) is to proudly carry the identities of the two universes at the source of Ms. Pidgorna’s creativity. It is neither contemporary music coloured by folklore, nor folklore sophisticatedly orchestrated. Pidgorna’s art lies in a unique resonance, a kind of third stream between the two. If you are at least a little familiar with Ukrainian avant-folk music, you might place Anna Pidgorna somewhere between DakhaBrakha and Cukor Bila Smert’ (without the electro).
The support of the Ludovico Ensemble, a group with a very variable geometry from Boston, is also essential to the flourishing of these amazing musical settings. The percussion, cymbalom, prepared piano, violin, cello, and double bass, draw the scenes with an unstoppable force. We have the impression of witnessing pre-Christian shamanic rituals, while being irrevocably reminded of a certain modernity.
Ms. Pidgorna has already won the SOCAN Foundation’s Emerging Composer Award. No doubt in my mind that this award was well deserved, and that she will earn more accolades for this creation that is unlike anything else.
One of the best surprises of the year 2025.
