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Rating: Years ago, I read an interview with Jeff Beck in which, at a certain point, he was asked what music he was listening to at home at that time. He replied, "Old blues, Beatles, and... lots of Bulgarian choirs!" Keen ear, the late great Jeff.
One of Bulgaria's excellences is indeed these vocal groups of women, directly funded by the government because they are a national treasure. The singers are meticulously selected from a very young age, and from that moment they are trained to perform an extremely challenging repertoire that, to us Westerners, is rather exotic, made up of quarter tones, polyphonies and counterpoints, dissonances, composite and overlapping times, falsettos, and I don't know what else.
The reaction of a Westerner to such a wealth of cultural and artistic delight is, or at least should be, one of strong emotion. The incomprehensible Bulgarian language plays its part; who knows what these singers are telling each other... whatever it is, the effect is inevitably touching, intense, special.
The women perform dressed in their traditional costumes, colorful but simple. Their impressive skill and discipline do not at all undermine the emotionality of their message. Every now and then one of these choirs makes a stop in Italy, generally hired by some intelligent municipal cultural assessor, and thus one can fully enjoy their performance in one of the extraordinary town squares of this wonderful and deteriorated nation, aged so poorly. The experience is unique and poignant.
Angelite is one of the most renowned ensembles in the field, the album in question is from 1999 and features the collaboration between the Bulgarian female choir and a Russian jazz/ethnic trio (horns, woodwinds, and keyboards along with voices) called Moscow Art Trio, and in addition, Huun-Huur-Tu, also a Russian choir, equipped with a series of traditional instruments that I won't bother to name... Okay, I'll name one: doshpuluur.
Where politics and ignorance fail, music succeeds in intersecting different ethnicities, different tunefulness, distant yet rooted traditions, leaving good music enthusiasts surprised and admired, whatever their personal taste may be.
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