What a strange–and brave, and utterly intriguing–recording this is. It’s just as weird and otherworldly-sounding as I remember from my first encounter with it about nine or 10 years ago. Gregorio Paniagua’s interpretations hover at the edge of performance art, from the “sonorous explosion” of the Anakrousis that opens the album through the percussive slams of the Second Delphic Hymn to Apollo. As Paniagua writes in the introduction: “We do not claim, with this record, to be making a mere compilation of what has been preserved of Greek music…It is more in the nature of the personal expression of a profoundly sad feeling in the face of an irremediable loss.” Paniagua’s sense of loss renders these as much dramatic theatrical statements as they are experiments in musicmaking. Utilizing a small chorus of six and a battery of instruments, he creates a fascinating landscape of sound, with thunderous breaks of fragmented melody and shards of recited and sung poetry breaking up periods of silence.
Unfortunately, the voices are muddied and echoey, to the point that discerning the texts is quite difficult. (It’s also clear that some of Paniagua’s Spanish musicians are having a hard time pronouncing the language.) Regrettably, the skimpy notes do not shed any illumination on this matter: it would have been a boon to have included the texts (preferably in the original and in translation), at least for this reissue, part of Harmonia Mundi’s midpriced “Musique d’Abord” series. Furthermore, I would have been very interested to read Paniagua’s thoughts on this recording, 21 years after its first issue in 1979, but no such luck there either.
