#4759, Tarta Relena From Big Ears Festival 2023

Hear Barcelona-based Tarta Relena, both their body of recorded music, and an interview and performance recorded on location at Big Ears Festival 2023. The Catalan folk duo’s vocal-based music limns centuries and borders, ranges from the sacred to the secular, and often uses electronics. Their body of work so far reimagines Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments, and the 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Then, there's their setting of verse from Afghan Pashto women singing about “controversial subjects such as envy, broken hearts, hatred or lust”, and their adaptations of sacred music (they met as members of a religious music choir), (Songlines, 2022). Singing in Catalan, Spanish, Greek, Latin, English and Ladino, they treat each language as a tool, a color to bring up an emotion.

Tarta Relena’s arrangements and performances traffic in the intense spirituality and human connection of the music, which lands with joy and poignancy, enhanced by dramatic use of electronics: percussion, drone, some bass synth, and vocal effects. For this New Sounds, Barcelona-based Tarta Relena - Marta Torrella and Helena Ros - sing a cappella, just like they started the duo back in 2016, from the 2023 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN. And, listen to a hefty sampling of their 2021 album, Fiat Lux. [As a fun aside, “Tarta relena” means “stuffed pie” in Spanish.]

Also, hear another setting of these Afghan Pashto women’s folk poems called landays - ranging from a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms - sourced from the collection translated by Eliza Griswold, I Am the Beggar of the World. From a song cycle called Waves and Lines by New Zealand-born composer Gemma Peacocke, listen to "Love", featuring vocalist Eliza Bagg together with piano, percussion, bass, and electronics.   - Caryn Havlik

Program #4759, Tarta Relena From Big Ears Festival 2023 (First aired 6/8/23)

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Me yelassan [2:32]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Hildegard von Bingen: Nunc aperuit nobis [2:03]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Esta Montagne d’enfrente [2:24]
RECORDING: Live, Knoxville, Big Ears festival 2023
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: The work appears on Fiat Lux, available at tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Stabat mater [4:45]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: El suïcidi i el cant [4:03]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Tota Pulchra [2:58]
RECORDING: Live, Knoxville, Big Ears festival 2023
SOURCE: This performance not commercially available. 
INFO: The work appears on Ora Pro Nobis, available at tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Relatable content [2:35]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Tarta Relena
WORK: Safo [3:51]
RECORDING: Fiat Lux
SOURCE: La Castanya
INFO: tartarelena.bandcamp.com

ARTIST: Eliza Bagg
WORK: Gemma Peacocke: Love [5:31]
RECORDING: Waves & Lines
SOURCE: New Amsterdam Records
INFO: gemmapeacocke.bandcamp.com