For most of his life Giya Kancheli kept a second catalogue beside his symphonies and liturgies: a large body of themes written for films and stage productions in Soviet Georgia. 12 Miniatures for Voice and Piano turns twelve of them into songs, with new Georgian lyrics by Ia Sakandelidze. The score was published in 2016 by Kancheli Music, three years before the composer's death.
Kancheli was born in Tbilisi in 1935 and studied piano and composition at the city's conservatory. He was music director of the Rustaveli Theatre for two decades and scored films for directors such as Georgi Danelia and Eldar Shengelaia. After 1991 he lived in Western Europe, first in Berlin and then in Antwerp, where he was composer in residence of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic. He died in Tbilisi on 2 October 2019. Rodion Shchedrin once called him "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist". ECM has recorded his concert works since Vom Winde beweint in the early 1990s.
The twelve songs are short, most of them between one and two and a half minutes on record. Their Georgian titles include Sizmari, Alleluia and Samkaro teatria, and the sequence closes with Iare tsin. The same pool of melodies, many dating from the 1960s and 1970s, also fed his collection Simple Music for Piano (2009), whose foreword invites performers to interpret freely.
The songs reached record in 2020 on Poetry of Silence for Gramola, sung by the soprano Madina Karbeli with the pianist Ketevan Sepashvili, who arranged them for a trio with flute. Reviewing the album in 2020, Norman Lebrecht described the vocal pieces as "little more than aphorisms" that unsettle in the same way as the piano miniatures. ECM had already gathered melodies from the same sources in 2010 on Themes from the Songbook, arranged for violin, bandoneon and vibraphone for the composer's 75th birthday.
This is a printed score, not a recording: an A4 stapled book of 40 pages in a soft 300 g cover, with the texts given in Georgian (in Georgian script and transliteration) and English, available through ECM.
