French composer Stéphane Furic - Leibovici dedicated his whole life to music, with unwavering conviction and artistic integrity. His latest work, the song cycle INNERLAND, is a fascinating neo-modern-romantic contemplation on music and poetry. Although INNERLAND is presented as a fifteen-track gapless recording, the individual tracks (seven poems set to music, seven incises and a final track that transcends them all) can be accessed separately, in any order. The seven poems will be discussed below. The word "Incise" ("Cut") is used to describe the tracks that consist of the samples of music material extracted from the songs and inserted between them to serve as the connective tissue of the piece. In "Confins" ("On the Edge"), the final track, the composer symbolically steps out of his work in order to comment on it by recording a combination of his instructions to the performers and the summary of the basic vocabulary of sounds used in INNERLAND. The seven poems that Stéphane Furic - Leibovici set to music were written by seven different poets over a period of several centuries, dating from the Middle Ages to our time. The choice of the poetry is the testament to the composer's good taste and to his interest in the powerful romantic lyricisms found in all of the poems. The central motif of the piece is love, understood as both "romantic love" and "being in love with nature." However, INNERLAND is also a story about a journey. The travelogue of this journey reads like a voyage of a fragmented psyche through the paysage of dreams. During his musical travels through this “innerland,” the composer ponders the relationship between the reality and one's perception of reality while he mentally revisits the sentiments and impressions from his past. The poets – who, like Hölderlin’s Wonderer, eternally roam through the inner human landscape – offer their lyrics which both lend the composer a welcoming shoulder to lean on and provide the conceptual underpinnings for his music. With masterful control over every detail and nuance, the composer borrows the exquisite voice of Almut Kühne to tell us an eerie story: a tale of love, perhaps of a great lost love. It is an account of being lost in and wandering through the interior landscape of one's heart, searching for the path that leads back to the outside world. Almut sings, speaks, and whispers to us, and she stuns us with bursts of vocal virtuosity. The piece is lightly scored, for two trombones and a voice - but the music is not "lite." With masterful economy of means used for the dramatic interpretation of the lyrics, the composer draws us into his world where he melds music with poetry. While listening to INNERLAND, the audience will feel special, like confidants allowed access into an inner sanctum. In The Tyger by William Blake (1757-1827) the singer, like an ancient storyteller, describes to her listeners who are sitting wide-eyed around the fire a mythical creature of great power, elegance, and courage. The scary vocal narrative is intercepted with silences full of suspense. When the trombones accompany the voice a major second apart, the song calls to mind eastern European folk music. The Griechenland by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is an ode to a glorious day - a magical journey across a mountain and through gardens above the sea. The composer renders this song as a ballad. The protagonist is a solitary Wonderer, one with nature and yet full of his own inner turmoil. The music follows the elation of the lyrical description all the way to its climax and then, when there is no place left to go, the composer decides to sustain the emotion by making the music stop. The voice breaks into short syllabic repetitions of a single note, breathless - decisively dissonant and lyrical at the same time. In Per mezz’i boschi inhospiti ("Through inhospitable wild woods"), a sonnet by Francisco Petrarca (1304-1374), the hero is in love and feels shielded by it while walking through the dangerous woods, where "even armed men fear to walk through." He sings while walking, like a child who sings to chase the monsters away. The interior dialogue between two sides of the self, fear and happiness, is musically beguilingly portrayed by reassuring repetition of the calming motif, played by the trombones, in answer to the anxious phrases of the voice. As in a miniature opera, fragments of action and reflection follow each other in L'alba ("Sunrise") by Raimbaut de Vacqueryas (1180-1207). The sad irony of the lyrics shines through the music of discord between the instruments and the voice. In this imaginary performance similar to that of the Provençal troubadours, the singer plays the castanets to match her perfectly intoned high staccato notes and shakes the tambourine during her wild trills on one note. She claps her hands at the beginning to "wake up the lovers who, unfortunately, must part at sunrise." In Querido manso mio ("My Gentle Beloved") by Lope de Vega (1562-1635), the atonal phrases of passionate outbursts of vocal virtuosity break up the spellbinding folk-like melody written as an accompaniment to the pastoral and erotic lyrical images of the poem. Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465), another medieval poet represented here, is called a father of the French lyric poetry and was reputedly the sender of the first "valentine." But his Rondel - En la forêt de longue attente* ("In a Dark Wood Wandering") is far from being a frivolous courtly love poem. Instead, his hero is a romantic Wonderer, similar to the one in Hölderlin’s Greichenland. He laments the loss of youth and his long lost love and now feels lost in the "dark loneliness" of old age. However, he wishes to believe that his lost youth and all the years of his life were not spent for naught, but that the memories of those good times will sustain him in his old age. Franchissement ("Crossing Over") is a simple but poignant episode of emotional upheaval composed as one slowly ascending and one slowly descending microtonal glissando in unison. Along the way up and down, the singer invokes a series of single words, extracted from the lyrics, each carrying a portent-message. The graphic score of Franchissement is equally dramatic and resembles the upward displacement of a section of the earth's crust. A master of symbolic romantic imagery William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), in his famous The Second Coming recalls a gruesome sport of falconry in which the wild avian predator is trained to swoop down in a gyre and hunt small animals. In response to the lyrics, the music is written as the embodiment of "romantic madness, "similar to that of Schumann, Beethoven, or Jean Barraqué. In this song, the composer excels in his prowess and through a veritable compositional rampage emulates that "dreadful text filled with the accents of bestiality." The Second Coming is a twenty-seven minute long song which can be performed independently from the rest of the cycle. This song is a testimony to Stéphane Furic-Leibovici's compositional craft as well as a proof of his deeply felt artistic concern about the pathology of human cruelty and the destruction and suffering that humans inflict on the contemporary world. We can easily imagine Stéphane at the Alte Nationalgalerie (National Museum) in Berlin, upon his arrival there in 2010, standing in contemplation before the Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea (1810). The painting portrays a solitary figure on the beach dressed in monk robes and silently gazing at the vast expanse of water and the sky in front of him, while the breakers smash against the shore. The atmosphere of this painting is quintessentially romantic, but the painter intentionally compressed the space turning the canvas into an abstract painting in a modern sense. Although Monk by the Sea is not the direct intellectual inspiration for the compositional ethos of INNERLAND, it perfectly matches the spirit of the piece. In response to the extreme romantic lyricism of the poetry, the composer chose atonality as the music language for his work. In this beautifully written composition in a traditional sense, the dissonance is not a surprising gesture reserved only for the moments of dramatic tension, nor is it used as an additional colorful effect; instead, it is always present, it is the thread woven into the texture of the music, the discrete fiber entwined in the cloth of life. The extended techniques are employed for dramatic purposes, and they challenge the performers' virtuosity every step of the way. At the age of twenty-five, after his studies at the Paris Conservatory, Stéphane Furic - Leibovici moved to New York and, from there, toured the world carrying his double bass. He performed with Chris Speed, Chris Cheek, and Lee Konitz. In 1996 he released his critically acclaimed first album, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, on Soul Note label, with music composed in neo-modern-avant-garde-jazz-improvisational style, representative of the downtown New York music scene. Now, twenty-five years later, Stéphane travels light. He carries only a fountain pen, which he uses to write the perfectly crafted music scores. Stéphane lives on a Mediterranean island where one small movement of head can dramatically change the view. On the left is the spellbinding blue sea, on the right the ragged rocky outcrops of mountain peaks. The arresting episodic spirit of his music, which is both elegant and powerful, mimics the nature that surrounds him. The entire repertoire on this album was flawlessly recorded in one take at the Funkhaus Berlin and is placed here before you as a gift of beautifully composed, performed, and recorded piece of music. Victoria Jordanova January 7 2016