Featured article - interview with Martina Batic - by Colin Clarke in Fanfare
Only recently, I interviewed OUR Recordings label owner Lars Hannibal. Here is a prime example of why OUR is an important label. Music of the utmost importance by Uroš Krek (1922–2008) and Else Marie Pade (1924–2016) nestles side by side.
Conductor Martina Batič conducts the Danish Vocal Ensemble (Danish Vokal Ensemble), a group she refers to as a “pure jewel.” Batič’s own career seems very much to be in the ascendent. She hails from Slovenia, which she describes as a “very small but beautiful country in Central Europe.” Batič did not come from a family of musicians (she is the one and only professional musician in the family). However, “Slovenia is a choral country. There is a saying that when two or three Slovenian people gather together, it is already a choir. We really sing a lot—one of the highest numbers of people who sing in choirs, mostly amateur, but we also have three professional choirs, the Slovenian Philharmonic Choir, and two opera choruses. At my house, my mum and dad both sang in church choirs and amateur choirs. Slovenia is a wine-growing country, and one of my tenderest memories goes back to my childhood when men friends of my father used to come to the cellar with a glass, and they were singing. It’s really in my DNA.” I could not resist asking whether the wine made the singing better or worse? “Better, for sure, it got this emotional touch afterwards—a sweet memory.”
Batič’s teachers were the first to move and impress her. “It was clear to me since my childhood that I wanted to conduct. Seeing Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic on a black-and-white television set, I said ‘Mamma, Papa, I want to conduct like he does.’” Her parents supported this passion in their first-born child, quite a leap of faith. “It’s not always the case to have such attentive parents who can see where their child’s passion is. I know I am blessed, and am really grateful for that.”
With the focus on getting experience as a young singer and later as a young pianist, Batič went to university at Ljubljana, initially studying music education. The wish to conduct was really strong, so after Ljubljana, Batič moved to Munich to study conducting. “This was a new country, a new culture, a new language to learn, and the experiences I had there definitely shaped me for my later professional life. After finishing my studies, I got a call from the intendant of the opera house in Ljubljana, who asked me to prepare its opera chorus for Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle. And I said, ‘Of course.’ This was actually my audition (which I didn’t know) for the job, and I got it. So, after studies in Munich, I returned home, stayed there as chorus master for five years, and continued my professional conducting career with the Slovenian Philharmonic. It had a professional chorus of 40 singers. I stayed there for 12 years as artistic director and chief conductor. During those years, in 2006, I also attended the choral conducting competition in Stockholm, the Eric Ericsson Award, which is the most prestigious conducting competition for young choral conductors. My wish came true. I always dreamed of conducting the best choral ensembles. This competition opened wide the doors to my dreams.”
Batič was taught by Michael Glaser at Munich (himself an ex-Thomanerchor Leipzig member, and a chief conductor at Bavarian Radio). Slowly her career went to different radio stations. “I was invited to be Directrice Musical of the Choeur de Radio France for four years. Just after finishing my contract there came the invitation—and trust—to take over the Danish National Vocal Ensemble (on the current disc), and also the Choir of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal.” This is Batič’s second season with the Danish Ensemble, a full-time chamber choir established in 2006. “There are 18 amazing singers with virtuoso vocal technique and the Nordic sound. It is an elite group of singers who make music together at the highest professional level.”
The music of our time is obviously relevant to this disc. “As a professional ensemble, we can perform basically everything, from old music, Renaissance, and Baroque to contemporary music. Mastering their voices to perfection, shaping sounds, dealing with many different languages and respecting performance practice, with an ability to follow composers’ wishes and conductors’ interpretations, makes the DNVE easily one of the best in the choral world. Thinking of them right now makes me such a lucky musician.”
The music on this disc is amazing. Fanfare readers might be aware of Uroš Krek’s Piccolo Concerto (Fanfare 48:1), but this is a very different side. The choral music is more thoughtful. Batič takes over, to introduce Krek: “He was a Slovenian composer, an amazing personality who was well respected in Slovenian society in the artistic and scientific world—polyglot, highly educated, a very intelligent man. His daily behavior could be described as aristocratic, but in the best possible way. Always properly dressed, his communication was always respectful, and in his presence you could feel a man of integrity, trust, knowledge, and wisdom. We can divide his life into three major segments: He was editor for music at the Slovenian radio/TV broadcasting organization and chief of the music program, an ethnomusicologist, and a professor of composition at the Ljubljana Academy of Music. His interest in folk music, and in recordings of it, is astonishing. He documented Slovenian folk music from all the various Slovenian regions. Actually, he could be called a “Slovenian Bartók.” As a professor of composition at the Ljubljana Academy of Music, he offered and shared his knowledge with many fruitful later generations of composers; while giving them the tools to develop their own musical expressions, he himself remained a composer of Neoclassical, late Romantic, and post-Impressionist tastes. I did not meet him personally, but as others talk about him, they describe him as a person somewhere between past and present. He was involved in and eager to know what was happening in the musical world outside Slovenia, always searching for news, and constantly improving his inner self. He was uniquely a kind of old soul with a perspective of the future. Krek was a tender soul, discovering his own voice of where he came from, what defined him as a traditional person with traditional values, and yet also progressive and modern in his thinking.”
Was there a shift when he worked for radio and with ethnomusicology, and where would Batič place the pieces on this album? “For me, he was a person who stayed true to himself. He spoke of what he felt, and being at the radio, with new visions but strongly rooted in the folk songs that define the Slovenian soul (solitary speculation at one moment, cheerfulness at another). In his music he searched for the Slovenian soul—which can have, and has, all the colors, from cheerfulness to melancholy. With vocal music, he got acquainted slightly later with folk music. This moved him profoundly, and his devotion to it is obvious. You mention the Piccolo Concerto, but let me also point out his music for string orchestra. Each time Slovenian orchestras were touring, there always was Krek on the program. His compositions show his mastery as a composer, with brilliant musical ideas, and a special feeling for form and beautiful colors. Krek is one of the best Slovenian composers. He had a unique ear for strings, and in connection to that, it resounds in his vocal music as well. The singers, when I brought this music to Denmark, said it was so easy to sing. His melodic ideas, his harmonizations, his deep involvement in word-painting and his understanding of the human instrument-voice is simply unique.”
The Three Autumn Songs I thought were incredibly beautiful. I actually couldn’t tell that the choir was not English (the texts are in English). “Generally, Scandinavian people speak amazingly good English. It is impressive.”
Those Autumn Songs are beautiful; Krek is very word-led and yet has his own structural approach, with a confluence of the words. With “It sings,” for example, one really hears that arrival. “He was very well structured and organized; for him the shape of the music was essential. He was himself fond of languages. He spoke so many different ones. He was very attentive to what he understands of the words and how to dress them; for me, his music is a higher language in a way. It is really thoughtful: What is the meaning of each word, and how is one to put it into music, in a melody, or in a harmonic vision? Both ways are perfectly connected and fused.”
Another aspect is how far one takes folk song music and uses that to bring it into one’s own vernacular. The Clock Ticks is the text of a Slovenian folk song, for example. “In Slovenia, composers have a special approach and relation to Slovenian folk music. They usually take folk melodies as material and arrange it as if into a new composition. This is not always the case in other countries. I could say that Slovenian folk-song arrangements are new compositions. Sometimes being on a jury with a folklore category, we do get questions such as, ‘Is this still a folk song? Or is this a new composition?’ And this is also the case in Krek’s Vöra bije (The Clock Ticks). We hear the folk song on the first page but then he develops it and makes a new composition. It is quite extreme. This is a choice, an option and understanding for every composer: how deeply he or she is connected to the roots of a theme, and how he or she expresses it.”
I guess Batič’s job, then, as the interpreter is to track that—like the Paul Klee idea of taking a line for a walk: “I like the comparison.”
The disc includes a Psalm (XLII), harmonically very radiant. “Krek was in love with poetry, with literature, with language itself. As I said, he was polyglot. He constantly questions and discovers the poets’ deeper messages—‘What do they think about?’—and he dresses up those words. I try to stay true to the scores, and to study the scores intensively and profoundly; making a detailed analysis of a piece is crucial for its interpretation. I always analyze texts separately, too. And with Krek’s music it is in a way easy to understand his ideas. His scores have all the required information—tempo, characters of the musical parts, words and translations. The way he puts the words into music is simply beautiful, meaningful. We can almost feel his humility and respect for music, we can almost catch him as an amazing tool in the hands of the muses, in the hands of music. Maybe Three Autumn Songs describes his personality very clearly. They are a response to the war conflict in the Balkans back in the 1990s. He himself said an artist can protest strongly not only with drums, but with gentle words. It’s about the inspiration within the text for him, and everything comes from himself.”
He set poetry by Jozef Udovic a lot, who said that Krek draws his words, not quite in the Klee way above but in the sense of pictorialism. “And also for me, there is the choice of tonality. Take the colors of different scales: Why use F Major? Why use C Major? It’s like he heard the colors. It is like an infinite painting, and each time you sing it you discover more detail, more extended thoughts of his soul, and his expressivity.”
I suggest that one also can hear that depth in the setting of Horace, I am yours, Muses. In terms of setting an ancient text, did Krek change his mode of expression, his response? “I think he was true and honest to how he felt the text. For me, Vester, Camenae (I am yours, Muses) offers not quite a Stoic understanding of Horace’s words, but this complete surrender to them.
‘I am here, do what you want to.’ It must have been hard for Krek to find his own way, bombarded by expectations. This was his expressiveness and his connection to the past. He was very much into Latin. Where did he find this text? And does he dance with the Muses, or are they sometimes a pain? He combined old and new, he managed to connect an old text with the times he lived in. This bridge between old and new, this is the result in Vester, Camenae. It’s like putting together two different times. With his choices for polychordal harmonies, he plays and offers a wide palette of sound colors, tones, vowels, acoustics. He’s a painter of the words.” Interestingly, the quartal harmonies sound completely different from those used by Mahler and Schoenberg.
Moving on to the music of Else Marie Pade (pronounced “Pell”; or at least that is the closest I can get when transcribing the Danish pronunciation! The “d” is between an “l” and a “d”). Else Marie, by the way, is not to be confused with another composer, Steen Pede (b. 1956). Else Marie Pade’s music did not make it to CD until 2005, as far as I can tell, but the music is astonishing. “This CD is a commemoration, and I like to think it is her 100th birthday anniversary gift that we offer to ourselves. A Danish composer of electronic music, she was a pioneer in the field. And her life—how she suffered. She was imprisoned, she was in the Danish Resistance, and was traumatized by these experiences. The 1980 piece Maria is actually her search for comfort through more religious thinking and expression. This CD, and Maria, is a direct result of her rediscovery as a composer. We chose three very different character pieces by her to represent her in very different ways. The Korsatser were based on a collection of Danish poems and originally were for solo voice and piano, in a more popular style. Sometimes at business meetings in big companies, they will start the meeting by singing a song: The Danes are a very singing nation. In Slovenia, every year they publish a collection of songs for all sorts of occasions. Everyone knows these songs, they are harmonized, and they sing them. There is a very strong culture of singing. However, I find it difficult to bring it elsewhere because of the language. To pronounce Danish is extremely demanding. Danish children start to speak slightly later because of the number of different vowel sounds, around 40. Luckily, we have the right chorus. I use English to communicate; I don’t dare to speak Danish.”
Regarding the Korsatser, the first one I found almost Christmasy. “Actually, it’s a love song. On the CD these three pieces were rearranged by the famous Danish composer John Høybye. I find them to be extremely beautiful, simple narratives and beautiful melodic ideas.” Is there a storytelling aspect? “If you extract and read the poetry first, the three pieces describe three different stories. The first one is about love, and the other two about Nature and philosophy. But they are slightly pop, jazzy in thinking.” This is a long way from the electronic music, I suggest. “But somewhere you have to start expressing yourself.”
Then comes the Völo-spa, a ninth-century Icelandic poem. “It’s a Götterdämmerung. It is based on the poem about Odin asking his female spiritual guide to look into the future. It is written for six-part female voices. It is in a way a blend of Gregorian chant with extended harmonies, influenced by modernist trends, though Else Marie Pade was also influenced by Hildegard von Bingen. It is again her own bardic feeling of form in this Icelandic poem, and it is a complete contrast in every way. It is repetitive, but vocally it is technically demanding. It has some challenges that demand good, professional singers.” The text is a combination of Latin and Icelandic.
But it was the piece Maria that blew my mind. It is scored for coloratura soprano, bass-baritone, speaking chorus, electronics, and seven trombones. “It’s a tape essay, really an electroacoustic work, and it all started as a sketch, as a sound. Actually, we used the electronic sound files Else Marie made herself in 1972, from recordings of various prepared piano sounds. She synthetically created sounds on the piano, and each movement adds synthetically created bell sounds that define each section. We had no idea how these elements would work together with the vocal parts until we combined them in the edit—so we were jumping into the darkness. The sound files were old, recorded on reel-to-reel tape, and we had to record the solo soprano and choir and baritone and trombones separately and put everything together afterwards. We had no information on exactly how things should sound, but we were all impressed by the final result. Pade wrote about five pages of technical instructions about the use of delay, how the choir should be recorded, about tempo relations between sections. Everything is so precisely imagined. It is mind-blowing what she was thinking and how she was able to write it down. She was a pioneer, a magician of sound.”
Also, according to Batič, “If you listen to this piece at home on a CD, it is best to have an immersive sound system. That way you get the full effect of Pade’s intentions, of how the sound should be projected into the space. You hear Maria—the Virgin Mary —first of all as she is in her earthly life. With each new movement, her position in the sound picture ascends, and in number 11—the final movement—you hear her voice coming from above as if she is already in Heaven. I am speechless as to what this music can do. It’s a vertigo effect. Within two minutes, you are in a different world, experiencing a universal sound. It’s on the earth, but it is in the sky too; it’s something you cannot hold, but it expresses Pade’s own pain and anguish. It’s a Credo in a way, and in fact its text is in Latin in the eleven verses. The bass-baritone is like a deacon, and the choir is like the apostles reacting to Maria and her feelings.” Seven trombones: a mystical number? “An apocalyptic thing.”
I had to ask, where did they find the utterly remarkable Anna Millmann? “She is the youngest member of the Danish Vocal Ensemble. She is incredible in what she can do with her voice and in such an easy way. Of course, Mother Nature gave her this voice, but she is an extremely hard worker and does everything with such grace and profundity. Those extreme high notes, F♯ in alt, repeated again and again and again; the sound engineer asked if he should help, but there was absolutely no need. She is one of the rare voices of the world.” And she hangs around up there a lot. “And rhythmically, too, that solo line is written as if for an instrumentalist. Anna’s mother is a flutist, and she prepared by asking her mum, would you mind playing my part? I was really impressed. It was so nice that she could perform with such understanding of and respect for Else Marie’s piece. And Anna is such a beautiful person. I was really happy and blessed.”
I mention that I also like the bass-baritone, Jakob Soelberg—not to mention the trombones in the “Judicare” (which unsurprisingly uses them). “We were able to use members of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra—professional players, for sure. This is one of the advantages of working in a broadcasting house. It is our mission not only to perform at the highest level, but also to offer learning, outreach, everything this can offer to an audience as a part of art.”
Also, I have to ask about the breathing in “Scire” (the eighth movement). Why is there so much breathing here? “I think Else Marie would be the best person to ask! But breathing is everything, the beginning and the end. And also knowledge—to know things is connected to breathing for me. So it’s a philosophical element—and, as I said, the greatest religious work for her. For her, this breathing was the necessary engine to survive her traumatic experiences. ‘I need to breathe in order to survive.’ I was very impressed by how Pade, in the piece, incorporates rhythmical breathing—inhaling, exhaling. It’s important not only to inhale but to exhale, and how to speak while exhaling. One must know how to express what is inside one’s self, the idea itself: ‘To breathe is to know.’” I mention Stockhausen, and his emphasis on “Atem,” on breath as a carrier of life force. But again, this is pure speculation.
The only thing that crossed my mind regarding recording in a studio is whether this should be performed and/or recorded in a sacred setting such as a church or cathedral. “Since this is a religious work, if we strictly follow this idea, it calls for a church with a big acoustic and a connection to a sacred place. But with so much electronic hardware needed—loudspeakers, cables, microphones—it is quite a demanding set-up to do in a church. It’s easier to have these necessities in a recording studio, where you can very easily recreate the acoustic of different churches, with different reverberation characteristics. You can play with it big time. This was the behind-the-scenes idea of Mikkel Nymand, our sound engineer.”
Finally, there is the foregrounding of the Divine Feminine, often a position in the minority, despite the Stabat mater settings elsewhere. “I am deeply moved. Maria/Mary, especially in Christianity, has an important role. She is a comforter in so many ways, as a mother. This is what we need today even more. We need both sides. They always say if you pray to Mother Mary, she has a direct connection to her Son and to God. She will definitely help.”
Putting the two together, hearing Krek’s music before that of Pade’s, does the one color how we hear the other? “Actually, there is a thought-through performing order. It’s good that we start with Krek and then progressively go toward Else Marie. Krek is more traditional as regards the choral sound, and then progressively we move toward the electronic sounds, which are a natural development (even though some of Krek’s works were written after Else Marie’s).” It is surely not possible to end with anything else but Maria. “The best is saved for last. This is mind-blowing.”
What is next, then, in terms of recordings and performances? “This CD is for the DR Vocal Ensemble, the third in a row in which they have combined the music of two different composers. The first was Martin and Martinů, the second was Kodály and Ligeti (Fanfare 45:5). We will stick with this one; however, the season is in progress, and we are planning amazing things for the future: thematic concerts, special occasion concerts, festivals. We try to program so that it broadens the audience. We try to show the wide range of possibilities that the DR Vocal Ensemble has at the highest level.”
KREK Three Autumn Songs. Vöra bije. Salmo XLII. Samono ugibanje. Vester, Camenae. ELSE MARIE PADE Korsetser. Völo-spa hoc est. Maria • Marina Batič, cond; Danish Natl Voc Ens • OUR 8.226924 (68:06)
https://fanfarearchive.com/articles/atop/48_5/4850100.aa_O_Listen_Conductor.html