The Rustavi Choir

The Rustavi Ensemble (pronounced "roostahvi") is the best known of a considerable number of talented groups currently performing Georgian music. It was created in 1968 by Anzor Erkomaishvili, a singer and folklorist from a distinguished Georgian musical lineage that goes back seven generations. After graduating from the Tbilisi Conservatory, Erkomaishvill gathered singers from various parts of Georgia and began to build a repertory that brought together their different regional song styles and vocal timbres. Georgian vocal music is strictly divided between men's and women's genres, and from the beginning, the Rustavi singers have been male. Most songs are sung a cappella, but spare instrumental accompaniment on stringed instruments such as the "chonguri" and "phanduri" is sometimes added. A group of players within the Rustavi performs a separate instrumental repertory, and the Ensemble now also includes a dance troupe.

The Rustavi's eclectic, yet authentic, repertory was an innovation in the performance of Georgian music. Earlier vocal ensembles had mixed together traditional folk songs and popular composed music, or focused narrowly on songs from their own particular region. These regions, named after the ancient Georgian tribes that settled them, still represent the traditional territories of ethnic groups descended from the tribes. Erkomaishvili's vision was to break through these ethnic boundaries of regional styles while performing ethnographically authentic music from all of Georgia. The Rustavi's performance style synthesizes the powerful, rough-hewn sound characteristic of the traditional regional folk choirs with a newer, cleaner, more finely-honed aesthetic whose orientation is towards concert presentation - nowadays on an increasingly international scale. While striving to preserve, and in some cases recreate, authentic voicings and vocal timbres, the Rustavi singers have simplified the complex scales used by the earlier choirs in order to create firmer, more brilliant harmonies. The use of a smaller number of Singers for certain songs has also helped to clarify their musical structure.

Discography

Heroic Songs & Hymns From Georgia

Odoiya Chona Tskhenosnuri Romelni Kerubinta Hasanbegura Didou Nana Adila Ali Pasha Naduri Batonebo Kviria Chven Mshvidoba Maqruli Gikharoden Shen Tsmindao Dedopalo Utush Lashkruli Perkhuli Chakrulo

Georgian songs are unabashedly the province of men, as is battle and heroism. All of these areas are the ground for the display of manhood. This is obvious not only in the sheer volume the fourteen trained singers can project but through the musical qualities, metallic ringing harmonic convergences, crashing polyphonic melodies and robust drones. On the reverse side of the wild abandon and swagger is a deep seated contemplative approach to liturgical hymns, an attitude that has been cultivated by sixteen centuries of of Orthodox Christian worship. The Rustavi Choir is the vocal component of The Rustavi Ensemble, the foremost of the Georgian music and dance companies who have chosen to keep the traditions of their people vibrant and vital, and when necessary, bring them back to life. That effort is particularly important in this post Soviet period when tradition is the only source of social cohesiveness. And they are magnificent singers!

Georgian Voices

Tsmindao Chmerto Tshkenosnuri Mival Guriashi Ali Pasha Orovela Lashgvash Odoya Hasanbegura Mirangula Chakrulo Sabodisho Lechkhmuri Makruli Kebadi Guruli Naduri

For over thirty years The Rustavi Ensemble, under the artistic direction of Anzor Erkomaishvili, have been painstaking in collecting and sometimes recreating the songs, instrumental music and dance of all the regions of Georgia which were the domains of separate tribes and therefore unique musical traditions. The songs on this recording were chosen from an anthology entitled "100 Georgian Folk Songs" which had been commissioned by Melodiya, the Soviet recording company, in the mid 1980's. The compiler was Ted Levin who, with Anzor, picked a wide stylistic representation of the three part polyphony which is unique to the area. The music sounds Eastern and Western, religious and secular, modern and archaic all at the same time. Among the singing techniques on this disc you'll find a unique, high-register, sustained yodel called krimanchuli to be a completely original sound found nowhere else in the world. It is amazing!

7208 CD $15.98

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