Eve Beglarian - Tell The Birds (2006)

Even though Tell the Birds, Eve Beglarian's 2006 release on New World Records, has the appearance of a concept album, it is really a compilation of surprisingly varied, collage-styled sample pieces composed, performed, and recorded between 1994 and 2004. Like many other fledgling collections of new works, this album has a loose, patched-together feeling, as if Beglarian had selected her most significant efforts of the past decade and polished them up a little for the occasion; but unlike composers who gather their best works for their debut CDs and try to give them a unifying theme after the fact, she makes no pretense of having fashioned any cryptic or meaningful interconnections between them. This is just as well, since Beglarian's vibrantly eclectic music works on many levels quite satisfactorily, without additional layers of explanation or justification to complicate things. The big pieces, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1994) and Creating the World (1996), are richly layered with wry recitations and lively musical patterns, and leave strong impressions of coherence despite their seemingly improvised or scattered delivery. Listeners may not find some of the shorter selections equally as appealing; such tracks as Robin Redbreast (2003) and Wonder Counselor (1996) are much weaker than the larger-scaled, multifaceted works, and because their ideas are slighter and their resources thinner, they pass by as mildly amusing interludes but nothing more substantial. Landscaping for Privacy (1995), narrated by Beglarian with accompanying electronics, may be considered her best-known piece, previously released in 1998 on CRI, but it is also the most personally revealing; accordingly, some may find this track the most involving, even though the instrumental Flaming O (1995, revised 2004) is clearly the most impressively scored and intellectually stimulating. New World's reproduction is clean and clear, though the levels are a little variable, due to the different venues and engineers.