The new album of the Yulangelo formation was released in November – just before the beginning of the major Orthodox and folk rituals, designed to send the old year and welcome the new one. Listen over the next minutes some of the recordings from this album, entitled 42.
Yulangelo is different from all Bulgarian formations that perform Orthodox-Slavonic music. The musicians do not take part in rituals, they perform mostly on stage – in this country and abroad. One of their main tasks is the presentation of unknown works on canonical text. The repertoire of Yulangleo also includes folklore samples, besides Orthodox music. They often look for a connection in the intonations of both vocal traditions, interweaving melodies and rhythms. This is also a feature of the album that we present to you. Listen now to the Zaidi, Zaidi, Yasno Slantse folk song, with Yulian Perikliev as a soloist.
The formation’s name combines the first syllables of the names of its founders Yulian Perikliev, Andrey Zahariev and Georgi Karkelanov. The trio was created in 1998 and it gradually attracted other musicians. Today Yulangleo is a chamber vocal band, often accompanied by a shepherd’s pipe, drum and other folk instruments.
“This album, named 42 is the forth one in our modest discography", Yulian explains. "We put together samples from Georgia, Corsica and Armenia, Bulgaria… The thread that links them is obvious – similar music courses, jewels that look like each other – all this selected according to our own feeling for interconnection. The good thing about music is that one can combine many favorite things together. As far as the title is concerned, we selected it for two reasons. Bulgaria, Corsica and Georgia are all situated along the 42nd parallel. Armenia is also quite close to it. The other reason is related to the book by Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but this one is too complicated to be explained to those, who haven’t read the book.”
Yulangelo’s conductor Yosif Gerdzhikov is one of the best Bulgarian experts in Medieval music. He has led the formation since 1998. The formation has performed in a series of European countries, Belgium, Sweden and Spain among them. Listen next to a Corsicana song, named A me brunette with Andrey Zahariev as a soloist.
Almost all members of Yulangelo are young people. Some of them have quite different occupations. Andrey is TV host. Yulian will soon graduate as a theologian. Listen next to the story of their common interest in medieval music.
“As students at Sofia’s high school for ancient languages and cultures we participated in the creation of a youth chamber choir for ecclesiastical chants,” Yulian reminds. The late Mrs. Liudmila Dobrinova was the founder and leader of the choir. She organized a Peleya expedition under an UNESCO project. She used to take us around different villages during the summer break. We wrote down chants of elderly people – priests, singers that participated in liturgies. The canonical text was one and the same – it could not be changed. However, those people had transformed the melody via their own folk sense of style. We recorded some of those in our first album. Then in the Manuscript – our second album, we included chants, created in the beginning of the 19th century at the Rila Monastery – one of the greatest Bulgarian spiritual centers.”
English version: Zhivko Stanchev
