Laments, Dances and Lullabies, volume 1

“In 1997, the editors of Guitar Player magazine voted the Serbian guitarist/composer Miroslav Tadic one of the world’s 30 most radical and individual guitarists. His formal training as a musician included a wide variety of styles including baroque, classical, blues, jazz and rock. In recent years he seems to have developed his own voice and uses musical material drawn from a great variety of sources including Indian and Eastern European folk music and blends these traditional tunes together with original and often improvisatory material. The three pieces contained in this first volume of laments, dances and lullabies begin with Rustemul, a typical dance of south-western Romania. This is a cheerful and buoyant rustic-styled dance in compound-duple time and in order to capture this rustic quality Tadic suggests that the precision of 6/8 be abandoned in favour of a more “earthy” approach, a characteristic interpretation which would probably come more natural to Tadic than most. The composition Macedonian Girl is built around the celebrated (in Macedonia) piece Makedonska Devojce composed by one Jonce Hristovski in 1964 and a work which became his biggest success. Listening to the original tune from one of many versions on You Tube, it is easy to see the attraction of this very beautiful and evocative piece of music and Tadic’s composition based upon this tune works extremely well in this setting. The trio concludes with a stunning blockbuster of a piece with Walk Dance, . a high-octane, extremely animated composition based upon a traditional Macedonian dance which translates out as Coppersmith’s Dance, stylistically, the beginning reminds one of the splendid Jose Gonzalez cover of The Knife’s composition Heartbeats, which was used in a commercial for Sony several years ago. If you can remember that piece, then imagine it accelerated to a very high degree, you’ll get the picture. The incessant beat in 11/8 time of 2+2+3+2+2 drives this music ever onward; the work is hypnotic, exciting, invigorating and leaves one breathless at the end of it. A staggering new piece, which would be a hard act to follow in any recital and a work, incidentally which is dedicated to Scott Tenant who apparently persuaded Miroslav Tadic to write it down. An excellent set of high-grade concert pieces. Highly recommended.” Steve Marsh (Classical Guitar Magazine)