Virko has amassed a very large library of reviews over the years!
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Review of Virko Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1 as seen in the Village Voice article, "The Upfront Continent" by Kyle Gann from May 16, 1995.
Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1, with 17 players accompanying committed soloist Tom Chiu, had something of the same spirituality as Part and Gor– ecki, but with more subtle complexity and less literal repetition. The opening– movement's mournful violin melody kept bleeding into the orchestra, whose delicate sonorities were dotted with vibraphone, marimba, harp, harpsichord, and piano. Baley conceived the work as a requiem, writing the second movement as a "Dies Irae" with galloping rhythms on unison bass drums setting an internal mood for trumpet fanfares and some devilish folk–style fiddling. Though European in its polish and complexity, the work provided the very feature that audiences listen for desperately and that the other composers so prudishly withheld: sonic images memorable enough to take home.
It’s a very serious ambitious statement by a gifted artist, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turns out to have more staying power than many other contemporary works by today’s trendier composers.
much of it framed by extra-musical allusions that place it in a solid context.
Baley’s music [is] deeply lyrical and emotively powerful in equal measure.
Review of BALEY: Parables & Reflections Kristen Wolfe Jensen, bn; Rebecca Henderson, ob; Michelle Schumann, p, Review of TNC CD 1524: Parables & Reflections American Record Guide, 2011, pp. 87–88.
“… exceptional compositions and fantastic performances.”Virko Baley, a Ukrainian composer, is currently a professor of music and composer-in-residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Kristen Wolfe Jensen is the bassoon professor at the University of Texas in Austin. These are works for the bassoon written over the past 20 years.
Treny-Laments II, a 14-minute piece that opens the program, has a rather sobering history. The inspiration for the work comes from a 16th Century poem about the author Jan Kochanowski’s loss of his infant daughter. The text and character of the poem compelled Baley to write a piece for contrabassoon, Treny I. It expanded later into a work for bassoon, and then for cello. In the midst of working on these, the composer’s mother passed away, as did two very close friends.
The piece is full of intensity and great sorrow. The soloist employs a wide and strident vibrato to underscore the pain of loss. The intoning of one of the bassoon’s most abrasive notes, the low F-sharp, is a mark of the composer’s familiarity with the instrument and his ability to paint the text in an appropriate light. At several points the F-sharp drone is heard like the terrible wailing of a parent who has lost a child.
A Trois is an esoteric work. Baley tells us the inspiration also came from the death of a friend and the desire to pay homage to him and a pupil of his. Because his friend’s student was fond of codas, the work is intended to be just the coda of some larger “imaginary piece”. From its first phrases, the listener can hear how rich and complex the content is and only wonder, as the composer probably intended, what the rest of it must have sounded like.
Five Songs Without Words is by far my favorite. Some might say there’s a bit of contrived sentimentality, but as the composer convinces us that the source of his inspiration has come from Emily Dickinson’s “Songs Without Words”, it becomes clear where that sentimentality comes from. Though her poems are far too gloomy and disparaging for someone who prefers to sit down with the likes of Heinrich Heine, Baley makes a point that the juxtapositions in feeling are pregnant with musical setting.
“The performance is hypnotic.”
After the three Dickinson poems, Baley goes on to write two more songs, one an imaginary wake, and the other a memoriam to a good friend of his. The performance is hypnotic. Ms Jensen and Ms Schumann play together with compassion and sensitivity to each other and the character of the piece.
The last piece, Partita No.2, is a set of three diptychs for bassoon and piano. Each new set demands a different character from the performers. At the beginning the bassoon plays a solo ‘Intrada’ followed by a duet, ‘Kozak Mamai’, where the performers seem to swirl around each other in a kind of quasi-lyrical, quasi-mocking fashion. The second set elevates the piano’s role a bit more. The two interact more, and by the third set, the piano, which is prepared in V, plays a dominant role in eliciting responses from the bassoon.
These are exceptional compositions and fantastic performances. The language in these pieces is a part of a larger context of exploration for new sounds in the world of instrumental music.
‘The performance of Uniforms of Snow by Shelton and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony under the composer’s direction is superb, and I can say the same for violinist Karen Bentley Pollick and pianist Timothy Hoft in the Ten Songs without Words. Pollick has a warm, shimmering sound, and Hoft’s playing is very sensitive and alert. Toccata’s recorded sound is up to its usual high level, and the program notes by the composer and John Schaefer are thorough and helpful. Patricia McRae provides an informative biographical note on Baley.’
I’ll state up front that I like his music very much indeed. […][
The cycle [Uniforms of Snow] as a whole strikes me as some of the most effective settings of Dickinson’s poetry I’ve heard—and I’ve heard many.
Renowned soprano Lucy Shelton hardly needs my praise, but gets it anyway for her beautiful and sensitive singing. Especially pleasing is the way she floats her high notes so effortlessly. In the dramatic songs, of which there are several, she brings considerable excitement and energy to her presentation. […] Baley, as the conductor, knows exactly what he wants in his music and how to get the fine musicians in the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra to fulfill his intentions.
In all 10 of these pieces, some of which are rather extended, the composer proves himself to be a master of mood and color […]
Violinist Karen Bentley Pollick and pianist Timothy Hoft are clearly both masters of their respective instruments. The composer praises their playing in his notes, and I do the same here. They both strengthen my conviction that Virko Baley is an important and distinctive composer, one whom I’d welcome hearing in other works as I might have opportunity. Highly recommended on all fronts.’
[Uniforms of Snow ] as a whole strikes me as some of the most effective settings of Dickinson’s poetry I’ve heard—and I’ve heard many. […]
Renowned soprano Lucy Shelton hardly needs my praise, but gets it anyway for her beautiful and sensitive singing. Especially pleasing is the way she floats her high notes so effortlessly. In the dramatic songs, of which there are several, she brings considerable excitement and energy to her presentation. […] Baley, as conductor, knows exactly what he wants in his music and how to get the fine musicians in the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra to fulfill his intentions. […]
Violinist Karen Bentley Pollick and pianist Timothy Hoft are clearly both masters of their respective instruments. The composer praises their playing in his notes, and I do the same here. They both strengthen my conviction that Virko Baley is an important and distinctive composer, one whom I’d welcome hearing in other works as I might have opportunity. Highly recommended on all fronts.’
His [Uniforms of Snow] embrace the inherent ambiguity, ephemerality, and secrets of her poetry more than any I’ve heard. […]
This is fascinating music with fine performances—especially from the ever-reliable Lucy Shelton, who has made a career from cracking into new music like this. As is typical for Toccata, the notes are detailed and then some.’
Some of the six featured songs "are reuses of songs I've already written for piano," Baley notes, "redone for a (string) quartet and a different voice."
But the essential voice remains Dickinson's.
"She goes along with my kind of" philosophy, Baley explains. "Ying-yang. She was a very contradictory person. She believed in yes — and she believed in no."
In such poems as "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" and "There is a solitude of space," Dickinson addresses such questions as "why do we live, why do we die — and why are we aware of death?" the composer says. (Such themes understandably resonate with Baley, who has battled cancer.)
Dickinson "wasn't sure there was a reason," but her sometimes elusive poetry expresses the "need to be more aware of how much we really don't know," he adds, "and how much we can't know."
A highly cultured, polyglot intellectual, brilliant pianist and a dynamic and accomplished conductor, the Ukrainian-born Virko Baley composes music which is dramatically expansive of gesture, elegant and refined of detail and profoundly lyrical. It is music which ‘sings’ with passionate urgency whether it embraces (as in his more recent work) folkloric elements from his origins or finds expression in a more universal style of modernism typical of his earlier music. It is always a singular voice and a deeply felt and acutely heard music.
My most vivid memory of the afternoon…[was] Virko Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1, quasi una fantasia. Conceived as a requiem, the concerto squeezes the elements of the mass into sonata-allegro form, with Lacrymosa as the exposition, Dies Irae as the development and the Lux aeterna as the recapitulation. The fourth movement stands apart as a festive wake, quoting folk figures with abandon and giving percussion-free reign.
Baley's music has been described as 'multilingual with a Slavic accent', and I can do no better. Somewhat reminiscent of the mystic minimalism of Gorecki and Part, the concerto takes almost cliched near-quotes from Kreisler and Paganini and turns them into an effectively haunting texture.
The work communicated an inherent beauty even on the first hearing. Its lyrical and idiomatic writing for the violin and its decidedly mournful tone touched the emotions with an immediacy all too rare in contemporary music.
"The two immediately striking and enduring impressions of the compositions on this compact disc are first, the distinctive sound world the music inhabits and the soundscape it defines; second, the bold and imaginative invention revealed in the clarity of the formal structures of each work...Baley's music has its own voice which sings with passion and conviction."
Virko Baley is a wonderful composer with a unique voice.
The compositional range of his fertile musical imagination is impressive and compelling."