Alban Berg Ensemble Wien - Ralf Yusuf Gawlick: O Lungo Drom, Op. 22 (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Ever since their appearance in Europe over a thousand years ago, the “Roma” – the ethnonym that the Roma use to describe themselves – have been labeled with derogatory, disparaging, and ethnically insulting words such as “G*psy”, “Zigeuner”, “Zingari”, “Cygan”, etc…, words derived from the Greek “Atzinganoi”, which translates as “untouchable”. These designations reveal a brutal social hierarchy which continues to plague and condemn the Roma to a pariah status in many places world-wide, subjecting them to constant discrimination and persecution - punctuated by infernal periods of enslavement and genocide. For centuries, literature about the Roma came exclusively from the ‘outside’, by non-Roma authors looking in, and it is precisely this literature that has persistently perpetuated ethnic, social and cultural stereotypes that have proven so harmful to this minority. It is not until the twentieth century – but essentially only in the past fifty years, that Roma poets and writers have begun to express themselves in written form in Romani (or Romanes), a macrolanguage of Romani communities, or in the vernacular of the countries or regions within which they reside. These are watershed years, since for the first time, the Roma ‘speak’ from ‘within’ to authentically express what has been shrouded in the fog of popular imagination for ages.

O Lungo Drom (“The Long Road” in Romanes) (2022) is an oratorio that tracks the history of the Roma and Sinti (a subgroup of the Romani people found mostly in Germany) through the words of Sinti/Roma poets and writers themselves. This oratorio contains many significant ‘firsts’: it is the first oratorio on a Romani subject, the first that sets multiple texts by Romani authors, and the first to be set to music by a Rom. O Lungo Drom integrates texts from thirteen different poets from thirteen different Roma/Sinti authors in ten languages and Romanes dialects, organized in a three-part narrative: I. Ascent - II. Nadir - III. Vista. Along with a Danse Macabre, Litany and echoes of Lili Marleen from Auschwitz, these voices combine to pave and express worlds of melancholy, grief, nostalgia, and exultation through rhapsodic, bittersweet, elegiac and introspective lyricism.

The ensemble for the première, and the commissioning entity for the work is the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien (ABEW), a Universal Music Group/DGG recording ensemble, with their first album released in July 2020. The ensemble is supported by the Alban Berg Stiftung/Foundation in Vienna (which also supported the Alban Berg Quartett in a similar role, the Hugo Wolf Quartet having studied directly with the ABQ). The ABEW (flute, clarinet, piano & string quartet) - along with soprano Clara Meloni, baritone Christoph Filler and cimbalomist László Rácz - just recorded the work for Decca in the Franz-Liszt Zentrum Raiding (the birthplace of Franz Liszt, the first great Western composer to recognize Roma culture in his own works) in the Burgenland outside Vienna. O Lungo Drom will be released by Decca/Universal in spring 2024 and distributed globally by Decca Eloquence, based in Australia, the executive producer being Cyrus Meher-Homji, senior vice-president of Universal Classics and Jazz.

The work was commissioned by the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien, and is dedicated to Romani Rose, head of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma.

Clara Meloni, soprano
Christoph Filler, baritone
László Ràcz, cimbalon
Alban Berg Ensemble Wien

Tracklist:
01. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: I. Ascent
02. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: II. Madre del alma
03. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: III. Sako rat me, devla
04. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: IV. Ricordo un bimbo
05. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: V. Zošto me donese na svet, majko draga?
06. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: VI. Aj muro trajo, sar o glindo rupuvno
07. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: VII. Nadir Bištu vekus, so dijan tu čorore romenge?
08. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: VIII. Totentanz
09. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: IX. Und eines Tages war die Gestapo bei uns an der Tür
10. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: X. Angekommen sind wir im Auschwitz-Paradies
11. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: XI. Vista In den Poren einer Frau
12. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: XII. Oj, jak pięknie w niebo patrzeć wciąż od nowa
13. O Lungo Drom, Op. 22: XIII. Je vous vends mes larmes


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