Motus

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“There’s plenty to admire and enjoy among the five substantial pieces on Motus, the new album from a Ukrainian woman composer whose activities range from playing folk to setting up an electronic music studio at Ukraine’s National Music Academy. Alla Zagaykevych’s work carries a whiff of the conservatoire and the sometimes heartless world of academic electroacoustic music, but for all her confident manipulation of modernist idioms, she never disguises the fact that there are real human beings involved. Motus’s title track is a seething writhe of electronica. Occasionally we hear the good old-fashioned sound of university music studios, what I think of as cuckoo clocks being smashed up with tubular bells, but otherwise Zagaykevych’s palette is more swirling cauldron than hardhat junkyard. She paints powerful sound images which lead to a scalp-stretching climax ten minutes in. Pagode pits the recorders of Jorge Isaac against live electronics, while Heroneya does the same with a quartet of cello, violin, piano and bassoon. Plenty of drama here, though I confess that when the electronics arrived I got an image of a tide of alien slime engulfing a Midwich Cuckoos-type village (the rural bassoon, perhaps), and this image was hard to shake off. There’s also a trio for violin, guitar and accordion, which moves playfully from Webern’s world to meditative moments. Best is the cello duet Gravitation, beautifully performed by Duo Violoncellissimo – no straitjacket here as Zagaykevych achieves the effervescent, skedaddling brio of an improvisation, coupled to the organised synchronicity of composition. Several times Zagaykevych contrives sublime endings to her pieces. In particular the album’s closing minutes, a reverie of high harmonics, show a composer moving from mastery of modernist style into something more personal.” CB