An absolutely breathtaking release from Kenneth Gaburo is a fully orchestrated and cinematic piece of work that bears heavily dramatic and some personal drive as these are intense and layered pieces and as it unfolds it allows you to visualize things in your head free will almost like a book giving you some detail but leaving enough for your imagination to fill the gaps.
The pieces are called Elegy and The Widow and was an opera originally performed at the Festival of Contemporary Arts in Chicago in 1961 and has now been fully restored for all to hear.
These pieces are robust, alive, intense, expansive, and have that heavy theatrical approach throughout it all with full sets of strings horns and everything else under the sun.
These pieces certainly do have this way of grabbing you and pulling you in with bursts of measurable ferocity and it all has such a heavy magnitude that it feels like it's crawling around you.
I am a big fan of the classic Twilight Zone episodes, and some of the stuff makes me think of those kinds of scores.
Immediately Elegy hits a certain soft spot with me and just the way it was arranged and put together as incredible.
The Widow has all the operatic vocals to it and also is exactly the way it was meant to be with its full-bodied and robust approach.
When you listen to each of these wonderful pieces of music you are taking two different places altogether, which is part of the beauty of it all. You're drawn in and take this massive musical ride and journey through all the different levels of intensity and emotion.
Elegy was originally written in memory of his father while The Widow is a piece that deals with several different kinds of loss or abandonment.
I find it such a wonderful thing that Neuma Records had someone (David Dunn) restore these pieces of music to have them put back out into the world for different generations of people to hear.
It is quite an experience to hear these works and it makes you think about all these different kinds of music that you don't know about.
I don't think a lot of other people are doing exactly what this record label does but this year fact that these have been restored to pay homage and to introduce these pieces to new sets of years shows a real love for music in general.
Kenneth Gaburo is heavily remembered for his pioneering experiments with electronic music and was a teacher of composers in the 20th century.
Born in 1926 and passed in 1993, it's a beautiful thing to have these two massive pieces of work restored and put back into the world again.
I highly suggest you take the time to listen to these when you are alone and with headphones on.
There was a lot to soak in here.
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