Warsaw Pact nostalgia album ticks all the boxes
Album Of The WeekIn the Lebrecht Album of the Week, the music is Soviet Russian, the orchestra Czech, the conductor Romanian and the soloist Macedonian.
What’s not to like?
Warsaw Pact nostalgia aside, this is a recording that encapsulates the other, older side of Europe, a darkly embedded culture that is under present and immediate danger of erosion from mass migration and EU homogenisation. The piano trio placed between the two concertos is simply breath-taking. The label is Scottish and the studio sound spectacular. Do not hesitate….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In Spanish here.
In Czech here.
I’m not sure how much some of darkest Eastern Europe is in danger of EU homogenisation. Quite a few of those countries — not just Hungary, which is only the most brazen — dug in and refused absolutely to participate in any assistance for Syrian or other refugees. (I assume the mass migration you refer to is emigration, not immigration).
Sure, there are some new nationalities in Eastern Europe — Albania, for one, has embraced the Italians for their investment, nit that they are new in Albanian history, and Polish friends assure me that they are delighted that there are some Chinese restaurants in their country now. But there is still a resistance to dark faces, to anyone from Arabic or Muslim — and all too often other Semitic — backgrounds in some places, and to disruption of long held norms.
Eastern Europe is my old stomping ground — I was in some tough places before the Berlin Wall came down. But it was in the air — people felt the change was coming. And they thought the streets would suddenly be paved with gold. When I cautioned a very educated, intelligent friend that “democracy has costs” he naively waved me off. He could not conceive of homelessness, food banks or unemployment, let alone the crime that sometimes accompanies hunger and futility.
As much as freedom from oppression and the right to speak as one chose, Eastern Europeans wanted nothing more than to be Americanised — as they saw it. To them it exemplified wealth and choice and opportunity. Some of that came, of course, with the fall of communism.But somehow it tarnished places where, if you were just trying to live a normal family and social and professional life, thing were not that bad, as a Polish housewife friend said to me.
It has all gone pear-shaped. Now formerly communist countries are so right wing it is sometimes terrifying (and hardly surprising, because communism as practised in the East was as right wing as any system the world has ever known, whatever SSF thinks). Some freedoms have been restored. Others are eroding daily.
Anyway, that review is one that has made me want to dash out and find a record store, if such things exist any more, and get a CD. I will have to look online, I suppose. I heard Trpčeski play years ago (Prokofiev 1, if memory serves) and I hear good things about Măcelaru, and what you have to say about the pieces is intriguing and a good and seductive introduction.
It is a grave misunderstanding to think that the EU is an exercise in homogenisation. It is an attempt to combine national forces and resources, on the assumption that a United States of Europe is in a better position in the world than all the small quarrelling countries, as in the troubled past. It will take generations before East Europeans understand this. To sort-out all of these problems of how to balance local interests with the interests of the whole, is the difficult trajectory ahead.
“Warsaw Pact nostalgia aside, this is a recording that encapsulates the other, older side of Europe, a darkly embedded culture that is under present and immediate danger of erosion from mass migration and EU homogenisation”
Nonsense on stilts.
(1) As far as I’m aware, Europe is all the same age.
(2) I have no idea what ‘darkly embedded’ means, and I suspect you don’t either.
(3) ‘Mass migration’ insinuates, probably deliberately, that the Muslims are moving in, when in fact the main issue throughout Eastern Europe is that the Eastern Europeans themselves are moving out.
(4) Pretty much everywhere in the world is getting homogenised, with little to no input from the EU. It’s called capitalism and the internet – the very things that enable you to presumably make coin from this website.
Thanks for the record recommendation though.
All 4 points are true.
“…. the main issue throughout Eastern Europe is that the Eastern Europeans themselves are moving out.” Freedom is excessively difficult to handle for people leaving the prison.
Warsaw pact didn’t have Yugoslavia in it. Rumania didn’t joint 1968 Czechoslovakia intervention. Albania withdrew from pact. Some DS music on CD was written before Warsaw treaty