"More than half a century on from their origins within the Bulgarian State Television Choir, the renowned and ever-evolving female ensemble is as compelling and transcendent as ever here, if even more intent than hitherto on reaching out into rarely glimpsed scared choral spaces. These are revelatory performances, in which definitions of classical tradition and folklore tradition are harmoniously shattered in unfamiliar but mellifluous liminal spaces. Both baroque archness and soothing meditation, both Orthodox church and verdant rolling hills, the mutual interdependencies and influences of folk and liturgical traditions are sung into a fluid and visionary space ... New conductor Katja Barulova delingeates a gleeful and diaphanous collection of the new and the familiar, immersed in both tradition and the avant-garde ... This polyphonic recital is fully conscious of Western harmonic expectations, but through a complexity of arrangements, a richly textured, chromatic presentation of powerfully pantheistic folk music emerges".
