Zebeljan:Chamber Music [Brodsky Quartet] [CPO: 777994-2]

Isidora ebeljan currently ranks as one of Serbia’s most successful composers. She gained international notice with her opera Zora D. composed as a commissioned work for London’s Genesis Foundation. Numerous commissions from renowned ensembles, institutions, and festivals have followed. ebeljan maintains a special relationship with the Brodsky Quartet, which have performed her entire ensemble oeuvre and for whom she has composed works especially. For ebeljan the folk music tradition naturally forms a central point of departure from which she goes on to create her musical world.
Although born in Belgrade, Isidora Zebeljan spent much of her childhood in the region that gave us Bartók and Kurtág. That s no surprise, considering the spiky beauty and joy in folk-dance that infuses her chamber music mature writing for quartet is full of texture and restless detail, and the Brodsky Quartet have long championed it. Their collection of seven works begins with the exuberant Polomka Quartet, in which dance episodes pile up with irresistibly increasing urgency. With soprano Aneta Ili , they make something vivid and ultimately powerful of the cycle New Songs of Ladaljan herself is the pianist in the haunting Sarabande and in Pep It Up, an android’s reverie in which it seems an entire drum kit is slowly thrown at the soprano, who vocalises wordlessly over trance-like, rocking chords. It’s the earliest work on the disc, and unfortunately the longest it jars next to the subtlety of the rest. *** –Guardian, 10/12/15At the heart of the album is the Brodsky Quartet, an ensemble who Zebeljan has often written. It’s easy to to hear why: their lithe and dauntless attack is ideal fit, and they can flit from fleet-foot dances to ethereal elegies without sounding forced or studied. –Gramophone,Jan’16This (is a)powerful recording. Performance **** Recording *** –BBC Music Magazine, Mar’16