There was no letdown in the premiere of an exciting new work by Virko Baley … Duo Concertante (1990) for Cello and Piano afforded both Ms. Tchaikovska and Ms. Osinchuk [Maria Tchaikovska's December 14 debut at New York's Weill Recital Hall]
ample opportunity for expressive lyricism in the Intrada movement, contrasted with the rhythmic vitality of the Mobile: Dances. Both artists shifted gears effortlessly throughout the turbulent score, culminating in the pulsating, almost primal-sounding last few pages.
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1
Another composer, Virko Baley, took the baton for the Cleveland premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1, with Daniel Barber as soloist. The three movement piece, composed in 1990 and revised in 1993, is a densely packed evocation of desert and river paintings by Rita Deanin Abbey. Baley doesn't demand that the listener make contact with specific visual images. He creates modernistic auras of spiky and hazy complexity, placing piano and orchestra in confrontations that embrace avant-garde techniques and jazzy hints…the piece has personality. The performance sounded striking. The composer brought theatrical impetuosity to his conducting, and the large ensemble responded with crisp, controlled artistry.
--- THE PLAIN DEALER (Cleveland)
SYMPHONY No. 1 "Sacred Monuments"
The French have a wonderful expression:
entre chien et loup – literally, between dog and wolf. It means something that is neither one thing nor another (neither fish nor fowl as English-speakers might say). Virko Baley’s Symphony #1: Sacred Monuments is entre chien et loup. Written for a chamber orchestra but with a huge arsenal of percussion and keyboards, it is neither a conventional large-scale symphony nor a more neo-Classical chamber symphony.
The phrase also refers specifically to that time of evening when the daylight hasn’t completely gone and it’s not yet fully dark – when familiar objects take on an almost unreal cast. It’s a time when you can almost sense what the Australian aborigines call the Dreamtime, the ancient but ongoing process of creation, where the physical world is shadowed by a close metaphysical one.
It is this netherworld that Virko Baley’s music inhabits…
Baley’s Symphony #1, Sacred Monuments is clearly “about” something. Listen to its elusive, multi-layered rhythms, often just at the edge of audibility; the dramatic, at times almost cinematic sweep; the obvious references to Baroque or traditional Slavic music; the chorales for strings. They all suggest there is something more than just a grand spinning of notes at work here. This symphony does not just give its secrets away at first hearing… As noted earlier, a symphony’s grand scope demands ideas on a similar scale. Virko Baley’s Symphony #1 is a meditation on some of the largest ideas – displaying an almost Zen-like acceptance of the contradictions between our physical reality and the spiritual/psychic world that we often unwittingly travel in; between the linear world of the arrow of time and the cyclical nature of life and death. Understanding this bipolar view of the world is essential to understanding Baley’s music.
--- John Schaefer, WNYC Radio
Ukrainian composer Virko Baley's Symphony No. 1 "Sacred Monuments" takes the Mahlerian view that "the symphony must be the world, it must embrace everything." What this means in practice is a wide range of musical reference, from folk music and Romantic melody to purely textural atonality, all freighted with a heavy dose of philosophizing in movement titles such as "Agnus Dei" and "The Hour of the Wolf"….One thing's for sure: this symphony packs a large variety of incident into its nearly 60-minute length, and it impressively commands the listener's attention. Baley's sense of musical timing is excellent: he understands the need to give his audience the necessary tonal or timbral anchor, establishing a point of reference in his kaleidoscopically shifting textural seas…It's all powerfully imagined, clearly articulated, and quite moving: think of Swedish composer Alan Pettersson with a more colorful orchestral palette, a wider emotional range, and less self-pity…The final impression is of a work finely balanced between expressions of suffering and offers of consolation, full of arresting passages and fresh sounds, and Baley secures what certainly must be a superb performance, magnificently recorded, from the Cleveland Chamber Symphony…It's a very serious, ambitious statement by a gifted artist, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it turns out to have more staying power than many other contemporary works by today's trendier composers.
--- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday
An evocative and emotionally satisfying take on Ukrainian music
In Dreamtime, his last major composition, the Ukrainian-born, Las Vegas-based composer Virko Baley stretched anyone's definition of a chamber work with a focused instrumentation that belied the piece's epic scope. Likewise, his First Symphony, which requires two keyboards as well as a battery of percussion, stretches the sonic boundary of what could realistically be called a 'chamber orchestra'.
Musically, the Baley signature is firmly in place as well. The past few years have seen the composer come to terms with both his Slavic heritage and modernist inclinations, with music that is true to both. Sacred Monuments has all the traditional elements that lure a listener in, with all the complexity that reveals new depth each time you return to it…The result is an emotionally satisfying experience whose power lies not only in form - the hauntingly Slavic scherzo of the 'Agnus Dei'; the conscious return to earlier ideas in the 'Postludium' - but in content. Baley gives us not so much a musical history of his native country as his own reflection of it from a distance, and the story is not nearly as important as its telling.
--- Ken Smith, GRAMPHONE December 2002
After my first encounter with the music of Ukrainian-born Virko Baley (b 1938), I remarked that he "writes abstract music that holds my interest"…This fascinating piece of music reminds me quite strongly of Alfred Schnittke's Peer Gynt and, sometimes, of John Corigliano's Symphony 1. It is astonishing that this expansive, kaleidoscopic work is for chamber orchestra (Baley is working on a setting for full orchestra, which should only strengthen it). Hats off to the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra for a superb performance.
--- Barry Kilpatrick, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, January/February 2003
Virko Baley completed his big Symphony No. 1, “Sacred Monuments,” in 1999 after an extended gestation that began with the composition of Duma, a soliloquy, in 1985…The work is big not only in length—almost an hour—but in sound. Baley achieves great power and variety with what is technically a chamber orchestra. Like Berlioz or Boulez, he seems to have learned well from his experience as a conductor what an orchestra can do. As far as musical style goes, Baley, a longtime resident of the United States now living in Las Vegas, clearly has not left his Slavic roots behind him. The closest comparisons I can make are with the Russian Schnittke (from the 1970s, to be specific) and the Georgian Kancheli. Dramatically, formally, and thematically, there’s always a lot going on in this piece, whether in the rushing irregular meter of the Agnus Dei third movement or in the time-suspended Postludium. The piece gets a little too overtly romantic at times and occasionally a little amorphous, but is generally substantial and well considered…The booklet has excellent notes pointing out salient moments of the piece and discussing the composer’s background.
--- Robert Kirzinger, FANFARE November/December 2002
DUMA, a SOLILOQUY,
from SYMPHONY No. 1
"I enjoyed listening to your orchestral piece (Duma, A Soliloquy), which I found profoundly original, even if I didn't agree with all its issues and stylistic gestures."
By Gilbert Amy, composer/conductor (France)
"Baley's Duma, a Soliloquy for Orchestra, in its world premiere and performed with tender loving care and consummate dynamism, was the starter of the evening. From passages of lyric beauty to dissonance, marked by some awesome percussion, the Baley work revealed what this Ukrainian master thinks and feels."
--- Bill Willard, LAS VEGAS REVIEW JOURNAL,
"...those who attended the Las Vegas Symphony Orchestra's most recent concert bore witness to a bit of history. On May 7 (1985) in the Artemus Ham Concert Hall, Music Director and Conductor Virko Baley's Duma, a Soliloquy for Orchestra was given its world premiere...Baley described his approximately 12-minute work as a reverie - an imaginary, dream-like interior dialogue that he carried on with the memory of a work by Ukrainian choral composer Artem Vedel, a tragic figure who died at the age of 41 in 1808, a victim of Tzarist persecution...Whisper soft chimes and muted brass began, followed by many individual 'voices' and frequently changes sonorities. Very loud, dissonant, percussive segments contrasted with extremely lyrical solo passages for violin and cello. The brass section near the end carried on this contract with tension-producing clashes and unison intonations, expressing "rage and terror," in Baley's own words again."
--- Esther Weinstein, LAS VEGAS SUN
"...'Duma, a soliloquy' by Virko Baley is written in a vivid contemporary musical language. A work of original and deep reflections (based on) the motives of the Choral Concerto No. 3 of Artem Vedel, it is a profound contemplation of the life, creativity and tragic fate of that 18th century Ukrainian composer. In the concluding section there is an episode which expresses anger and terror, recreated by brass instruments (and) constructed on the mobile signals of Carpathian trembitas, with which the Huzuls announce the occurrence of death; (in the Duma it) becomes for the listener the dramatic summary of the life of (Vedel)..."
--- KULTURA IN ZHYTTIA (CULTURE AND LIFE) Kiev, Ukraine (USSR), No. 52, October 25, 1988
VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1
"My most vivid memory of the afternoon…[was] Virko Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1,
quasi una fantasia. Conceived as a requiem, the concerto squeezes the elements of the mass into sonata-allegro form, with
Lacrymosa as the exposition,
Dies Irae as the development and the
Lux aeterna as the recapitulation. The fourth movement stands apart as a festive wake, quoting folk figures with abandon and giving percussion free reign.
Baley's music has been described as 'multilingual with a Slavic accent', and I can do no better. Somewhat reminiscent of the mystic minimalism of Gorecki and Part, the concerto takes almost cliched near-quotes from Kreisler and Paganini and turns them into an effectively haunting texture."
--- Ken Smith, THE STRAD (September 1995)
"Baley's Violin Concerto No. 1…had something of the same spirituality as Part and Gorecki, but with more subtle complexity and less literal repetition. The opening movement's mournful violin melody kept bleeding into the orchestra, whose delicate sonorities were dotted with vibraphone, marimba, harp, harpsichord and piano…Though European in its polish and complexity, the work provided the very feature that audiences listen for desperately: sonic images memorable enough to take home."
--- Kyle Gann, THE VILLAGE VOICE (May 16, 1995)
"Baley's concerto was the most ambitious of the four works. It was commissioned in memory of a man who had died, so its overall character is plaintive and nostalgic…The musical style is approachable, often beautiful."
--- Robert Finn, THE PLAIN DEALER (January 19, 1989)
"The work communicated an inherent beauty even on the first hearing. Its lyrical and idiomatic writing for the violin and its decidedly mournful tone touched the emotions with an immediacy all too rare in contemporary music."
--- Esther H. Weinstein, MUSICAL AMERICA (July 1988)
KRYSA PERFORMS BALEY CONCERTO. Much water must flow in the Vitsula and Dnipro rivers before we hear the violin concerto by the Ukrainian-American Virko Baley at a regular subscription concert. Yet the fact remains, that is where it belongs... [This concerto] is a nostalgic musical narrative about a land the composer left but never forgot. What a concert audience likes to hear is the kind of clear construction, juxtaposition of effects and lively rhythms this concerto exhibits. Contemporary means of expression underline a profound lyricism and an atmosphere that gives the listener the image of Hutsul mountain fields."
--- Ewa Solinska, Zycie Warszawy (Warsaw Life), September 23, 1992
TRENY (1996-1999; rev. 2002)
For Two Violoncellos and Soprano
"The strength of the piece lies in its highly - and unapologetically - emotional content, dispensed artfully with the utmost thematic discretion. The strength of the playing lies in Natalia Khoma's sense of drama and attention to timbre…"
--- Ken Smith, GRAMOPHONE
"Treny (“Laments”) is part of a trilogy of works by the Ukrainian-American composer Virko Baley that deal with the ultimate questions: questions of mortality, death, grief, and the legacy we leave behind… Treny is economically scored for 2 cellos and (in the end) soprano, and was inspired by the grief-wracked Renaissance poetry of Jan Kochanowski. Writing at a time of personal loss, and working with purposely restrained forces, Baley offers some of his most deeply felt, ingeniously developed music. Haunted by ghosts, suspended in a musical and emotional twilight, Treny is a masterful example of music’s power to express what words cannot."
--- John Schaefer, WNYC Radio
Treny ("Laments") is a 73-minute composition that encompasses two solo cello movements, a movement for two cellos, plus a final movement where a soprano soloist joins the cellists. Weld these forces to composer Virko Baley's introspective, darkly lyrical sound world, and the end results are remarkably sustained and subtle for a work of such duration and scope. It may take several hearings to grasp Baley's carefully deployed thematic interrelationships and transformations, but the sheer incandescence and registral resourcefulness of his cello writing are omnipresent…Soprano Olga Pasichnyk makes a gentle entrance with a wordless, unaccompanied lament that eases its way into Jan Kochanowski's haunting Polish texts, cradled by the cellists' delicate, interweaving accompanying lines. Once you allow your ears to flow with Baley's leisurely discourse, new details will emerge upon each rehearing… and let the music grow on you, or, better still, grow into the music. The rewards are worth your investment.
--- --Jed Distler, ClassicsToday
In his earlier works, Virko Baley has proved that he is not one to shy away from grand conceptions. If the 75-minute Dreamtime expanded the idea of chamber work to epic boundaries and his Symphony No 1, Sacred Monuments (Troppe Note 12/02), pushed the sonic limits of what constitutes a chamber orchestra, then Treny shows what the Ukrainian-born, Las Vegas-based composer can do with a piece for solo cello.
Treny, to be precise, is four pieces for cello, two of which are for the solo instrument, interspersed with one work for two cellos and a finale for two cellos with soprano. That is but mere detail; as a grand conception, Treny (literally, 'Laments') is a unified musical work spun from a single instrumental sonority.
… The strength of the piece lies in its highly - and unapologetically - emotional content, dispensed artfully with the utmost thematic discretion. The strength of the playing lies in Natalia Khoma's sense of drama and attention to timbre, where much-needed light shines on the pervading darkness just as the piece threatens to sink into its own gloom.
Hearing nearly 73 minutes of brooding Slavic ruminations on death … may not inspire much toe-tapping, but Baley does arrive at an effective catharsis. The vocal line, whose wordless hum soon blooms into a text reconciling itself to human morality, descends on the earthiness of the cello like a message from above. In delivering it, soprano Olga Pasichnyk floats like an angel.
--- Ken Smith, GRAMOPHONE, March 2003
NOCTURNAL NO. 4
"Of the new works, most attractive on first listening was Baley's own "Nocturnal No. 4". Thought reminiscent of the nocturnes and night music of Crumb, it has a strong sense of individuated identity and direction that was mostly missing in the other contemporary pieces on the program."
--- John Henken, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"...Baley's own dramatic 'Nocturnal No. 4', a moody piece, pushy, thoughtful and epigrammatic by turns."
--- Daniel Cariaga, LOS ANGELES TIMES
Virko Baley's "Nocturnal No. 4" uses piano sonority in sophisticated yet highly dramatic ways. In its center are 13 "Interludes" -- delicate aphorisms each with its own flavor.
--- Bernard Holland, NEW YORK TIMES
NOCTURNAL NO. 5 (1980)
"I certainly enjoyed studying your very beautifully written and sensitively conceived work, NOCTURNAL NO. 5. Laura Spitzer is a wonderful pianist and brings the meaning of your work right out front."
--- Vincent Persichetti
"Thanks for the score and tape of your piece (Nocturnal No. 5), which I enjoyed hearing...But I think it is a strikingly layered approach to the piano -- very difficult to play, it would seem."
--- Charles Wuorinen
"The Baley piece was a Nocturnal, fifth in the series (why an adjective is now needed where the noun Nocturne used to serve, he doesn't say). It was attractive, drawing on the filigree of Chopin and the nature-noises of Bartok's night music in a flittering, dissonant idiom. His use of buzzing sounds produced directly on the strings seemed to me far too frequent and regular for coloristic effectiveness."
--- Will Crutchfield, NEW YORK TIMES
"Nocturnal No. 5 by the Ukrainian emigre Virko Baley is a major work of wide scope, requiring the pianist to maintain four different lines in different registers of the keyboard...Since the language of the avant-garde is not always amenable to the Slavic personality, such efforts often seem experimental. Baley has progressed well beyond this stage. The work showed much promise until the climatic clusters broke the thread of progression. Perhaps a study of experts in the gradation of harsh dissonance like Stockhausen and John Becker would help to integrate his technique with his message."
--- SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Tuesday, August 27, 1991
"Happily, after an extended intermission, her program took a turn for the new, first with Virko Baley's "Nocturnal No. 5." composed for her in 1980. This is a truly independent and intriguing kind of piece, its concept proceeding from the polytextual motets of the Renaissance. The piano sustains four voices as separate identities in counterpoint. They are only very gradually brought together, the interaction leading to a brief fusion of fierce energy. A slow and declamatory line in the center is the controlling force around which, like satellites or mercurial characters, play the other lines -- discrete plucked tones in the bass, a running patter of a melody, and above that, sparkling "night music" events.
For all that activity, with the pianist in effect juggling, keeping four lines in the air, the impression is of a somewhat suspended or floating continuity -- night music to be sure. There's less linear tension achieved than you'd think. The explosion (drumming of the forearms on the keys), unexpected when it occurs, but after the fact it seems necessary as the work subsides. Spitzer's performance was a tour de force. Her considerable musical and pianistic powers are a their best with such a challenge."
--- Robert Commanday, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"She emerged as the total dynamist Sunday, once again injuring a finger in the very contemporary "Nocturnal No. 5" by Las Vegas composer-conductor Virko Baley. This far-ranging, free-form piece full of complex post-Cowell techniques uses rapid hand-plucking of piano strings (offering zingy metallic resonance) simultaneous with key-playing, as if it was written for three hands and two instruments. There are ghost attacks, too, along with volcanic forearm crashes on the keyboard. The four musical ideas eventually produce a climax seemingly strong enough to jiggle nearby faults into seismic activity."
--- Paul, Hertelendy, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
"The paternal spirit of Charles Ives was bound to show up sooner or later, and it made itself manifest in Virko Baley's "Nocturnal No. 5," a work for solo piano given a performance of tightly wound rhythmic energy by Laura Spitzer.
This piece seemed to contain all the quicksilver madness of Nathaniel Hawthorne's moonlit study, a darting, dangerous playfulness.
The music swelled to an intense roar -- Ms. Spitzer actually mashed her forearms into the keyboard for a deafening tone cluster -- and as Baley's galvanic piece came to elusive, shivery ending, one had the definite sense that a connection had been made.
If Baley's pice is any indication, today's American composers are just as passionately joined to the past as they are determinedly pointed toward the future, and you really couldn't ask for a more satisfying thing."
--- Richard Chon, BUFFALO NEWS
"Las Vegas composer Virko Baley wrote Nocturnal No. 5 for Spitzer, and she proved adept at capturing the strange, moody nature of the work. It's a contrapuntal piece, ranging all over the keyboard and even inside the instrument in an odd intermingling of sounds. At times pointillistic, at times producing atmospheric effects like a misty cloud of sound, the work built to an outrageous climax that seemed almost like a cacophonous assault, ending in gentle fragments of phrases floating to an indeterminate conclusion. It's an unsettling piece, and in Spitzer's capable hands, highly dramatic."
--- Karen Smith, TIMES TRIBUNE (Palo Alto, California)
"This work is deeply substantive and structurally well-balanced. The Nocturnal No. 5 brilliantly contradicts the claims that atonal music is incapable of lyricism, tenderness or songfulness. Employing a thoroughly contemporary, at times, innovative vocabulary, the composer speaks directly and with great emotional impact."
--- Oles Kuzycsyn, SUCASNIST
(Muenchen-New York)
March 1986, No. 3 (299)
SCULPTURED BIRDS
"A mood of human isolation...marked the equally successful, if more succinct Baley work 'The Jurassic Bird' for clarinet and piano...Here the object was more theoretical, more mysterious: the prehistoric evolution of bird from dinosaur. To suggest the stages...the clarinet was called upon to illustrate the catalogue of woodwind sounds, from mere breath to harmonics, screeches and even a final death rattle...A musicianly control of sound was on constant display."
--- Mark Crawdord, RENO EVENING GAZETTE
Mr. Baley's own "Sculptured Birds" was also austere and experimental -- the piano was rattled and strummed, and the clarinet imitated a wind tunnel -- but it put these devices to much more musical ends.
--- Tim Page, NEW YORK TIMES
Baley's own "Sculptured Birds" -- the first movement, "The Jurassic Bird," composed in 1979; "Eagle," "Bird in Glide," and "The Chinese Nightingale" added in 1984, for Mr. Powell -- struck deeply. The imagery was keen, the musical thought original.
--- Andrew Porter, THE NEW YORKER, Musical Events
TROMBONE PARTITA
"Baley's Partita for Trombone, Piano and Tape, is a four movement work that exploits the sonic resources of the two instruments...A compelling, though sometimes repetitive, work."
--- John Henken, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"In Partita for Trombone, Piano and Tape by Virko Baley, the soloist begins his part underneath the piano before assuming a more normal concert position. The work is in four movements with tape accompaniment, and if the musical gestures never seem to add up to much, their athletic demands are considerable and rather entertaining in themselves."
--- Peter G. Davis, NEW YORK TIMES
"Of particular interest was the New York premiere of a work by Virko Baley, who was also the pianist of the evening. Baley's colorful atonal 'Partita' is divided into a variety of carefully made sections. I particularly recall one in which prerecorded trombones slide around eerily in combination with the live trombone, and another in which the trombonist played under the piano, stimulating remarkably loud sympathetic vibrations from the piano strings."
--- Tom Johynson, THE VILLAGE VOICE
"As a finale, Virko Baley participated at the keyboard in his partita for Trombone, Piano and Tape (1976), a sometimes affecting piece including some remarkable trombone effects (stunningly played by Miles Anderson)..."
--- Walter Arlen, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Baley's Partita for Trombone, Partita for Trombone, Piano and Tape...had many meaningful moments, particularly in the opening Intrada movement and the closing Duma."
--- Wilbur Stevens, LAS VEGAS SUN
DREAMTIME
This is smart and captivating music….Baley combines an unflinchingly modern sense of sound with a flair for the theatrical that is reminiscent of George Crumb. The rich textures of the music are inspired by the odd contrasts of the dream world. Flowing lines of strings and flute are stretched across prickly percussion backdrops. Baley's insights into musical history occur in his dreams, sometimes as merely a harmony from Bach or Mendelssohn, bits of a madrigal by Gesualdo, or Asian motifs. Ukrainian music plays an important role in the work, such as in the furious rendition of a kolomyika, a traditional dance song…The Los Angeles-based California E.A.R. Unit plays this vibrant music with ferocious commitment and skill.
--- Peter Burwasser, FANFARE September/October 2002
"On March 18, at New York's Weill Recital Hall, one of the most highly regarded and adventuresome contemporary music ensembles in America, the California E.A.R. Unit, devoted an entire evening to a major work by an equally bold and visionary composer - Virko Baley...Dreams bridge the worlds of the real and the surreal. Stimulated by real life events and experiences, often mundane and commonplace, they launch the human psyche into fantastic voyages (sometimes nightmares), unfettered by reason or rationalization. It is precisely this state, when the mind is most free, that Mr. Baley's "Dreamtime" explores. The result is an invigorating, rollicking 75-minute musical roller coaster ride. Throughout the ride, Mr. Baley maintains a firm grip on the steering wheel, both at the macro level (i.e., the formal organization of the work) and at the micro level (the manipulation of the seemingly random and self-propelling sonic events)."
--- Oles Kuzyszyn, The Ukrainian Weekly
"...Embedded like jewels within Baley's Euro-complexities were movements and moments worth taking home: the gently rocking dissonances of "Tears", the bittersweet chorale of "In the Labyrinth. A really astonishing passage was movement 10, "Parastas", in which the [Dorothy Stone's] Ukrainian chant-quoting flute glided above the twangy murmuring of two Jew's harps...In a work with so many mountains to climb and lakes to wade through, it helped that you could frequently stand in place and savor the fresh air."
--- Kyle Gann, The Village Voice
"Virko Baley's 'Dreamtime', which filled the EAR Unit's entire program at the County Museum last week, threatened gadgetry just from the printed program: 19 movements running 80 minutes, their title suggesting pre-Columbian, Australian aboriginal and similar other worldliness…the music - spacey, its fragments held together by some unexpected logic, marvelously laid out for the awesome talents of this sovereign ensemble of new music performers, it had its captivating moments. You didn't just listen, as you do with Haydn, you gave yourself to it and sort of floated. Afterward at home, I let the trance continue by running a much-adored movie, Werner Herzog's "Where the Green Ants Dream," a sad and haunting fable set in the Australian outback. If you don't know it, or don't know Baley's music, (recorded on Cambria), it's time you did."
--- Alan Rich, L.A. WEEKLY
"As chamber music goes, Baley's opus is grand…Dreamtime lays easily on the ear and the mind…An intuitive, eventful evening, and work."
--- Josef Woodard, LOS ANGELES TIMES
...FIGMENTS
"...figments" by Virko Baley [for solo violin] are the furthest removed both from the traditional etude and from traditional concepts of a violinist's performance. Each has programmatic inspirations (explained in the Notes). They use a wide range of techniques for sound production both on the violin and externally, including foot tapping, finger snapping and vocal sounds - spoken, humming, whistling and so forth. The notation is equally wide-ranging, some standard and some not so; for example there are five different kinds of pizzicato (two further types if you extend your interpretation of that term) each with its Own notation. A primary consideration of the composer is that 'of the violin as a true two-hand instrument.' To this end the piece explores independent action of the different aspects of sound production, i.e. the bow and the left hand. Movement between differing bowing techniques and positions is notated producing constantly fluctuating timbres, highlighted in the first piece. Another effect of this is to produce distinct layers of action. The second piece, Kolomyika, a dance. . . has three such layers: a dance-like, strongly rhythmical melodic line, percussive and vocal effects. The third (Chorale…(Parastas)) is similar in nature but quiet, with echoes of Bart6kian night music. In these pieces, as in many of the others, dynamics are very precisely marked and form a major consideration in their execution. A Perpetuo Mobile, a dramatic juxtaposition of different articulations, dynamics with frequent use of harmonics as well as the type of writing you would expect from such a movement provides the finale to the set. By being so much more of a "suite" rather than a series of etudes " . . .figments" has less general value as a set of studies than the others [in the set]. However with this set, as with the others, anyone who takes the trouble to master them will be given plenty to think about in terms of violin technique and musicality… " (Note: Since that review came out, two additional etudes have been written. The set now has six works under the title of "…figments.")
-- Michael Newman, STRAD MAGAZINE (London)
KLYTEMNESTRA
"Klytemnestra [is] a dramatic scene for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, violin, and piano four-hands. Setting an English translation of a positively hair-raising Ukrainian poem, the 20-minute mini-opera delineates the poisonous fury with which Klytemnestra prepares to murder the returning Agamemnon. The vocal line - rivetingly sung by Leah Summers - is menacing, agonized, chillingly deliberate and intense as each instrument pursues an individual role underlines the horror. Baley's quotation from Strauss's Elektra - the four notes with which she cries out Agamemnon's name - adds a startling psychological resonance."
-- Shirley Fleming, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE May/June 1998