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Eleni Karaindrou - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Film by Theo Angelopoulos) (2004)

Posted By: Designol
Eleni Karaindrou - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Film by Theo Angelopoulos) (2004)

Eleni Karaindrou - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Film by Theo Angelopoulos) (2004)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue&Log) ~ 194 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 102 Mb | Scans included
Label: ECM | # ECM New Series 1885 | Time: 00:44:03
Soundtrack, Score, Contemporary Classical

Film and orchestral music composer Eleni Karaindrou has made a beautiful and moving statement with THE WEEPING MEADOW. A native of Greece, Karaindrou's influences are decidedly European, and within the music, one can hear the stamp of impressionistic composers like Erik Satie, avant garde innovators like Bartok, as well as Greek and Balkan folk forms. Karaindrou's music also traffics in 20th-century minimalism, creating tense, atmospheric spaces that feel empty and dense at once (one of the composer's frequently used motifs involves "patterns" that recall the tingling, polyphonic gestures of Phillip Glass).

Although several themes are reprised throughout the album, the combination of ambient textures, folk phrasing (accordions, guitars, and violins figure prominently into several pieces), and lush orchestral work keep the music consistently interesting. The pieces are often set in a minor key, so a somber, melancholic mood prevails yet never feels forced or melodramatic, and the spacious, tasteful arrangements are in keeping with the ECM aesthetic. THE WEEPING MEADOW is largely instrumental, but also features several choral pieces, adding to the variety and depth of the overall palette on this impressive achievement.

Allmusic.com

Eleni Karainrou’s music for film is more than incidental; it is genetically enmeshed in celluloid. Melodies come to her before she sees a single frame, when migrations are still conceptual, dreamed of. This explains the rawness she elicits from Theo Angelopoulos’s swaths of mist, water, and dirt in The Weeping Meadow. “She speaks the same language that I am when making a film,” the late Greek director once said, for indeed her soundtrack is anything but paraphrase. It is as much the film as the film itself, as broad of sweep and as inward of emotion as the characters in whose skin the music resonates.

The Weeping Meadow is Part I of Angelopoulos’s uncompleted trilogy on modern Greece and spans the years 1919 through 1949. It is the portrait of a pivotal century, a coroner’s report on the body of Greece.

Behind the camera is a nation ravaged by the Bolshevik Revolution—a force of displacement that cuts the bonds of countless citizens and sets them flying into whatever currents they can catch toward safety. The Red Army’s march on Odessa looses our main characters from the rock and goads them onward.

Like the hand-colored postcards in the title sequence, their beloved city exists only as it was, frozen at the height of its opulence by the touch of memory.

Writhing on the other side of Angelopoulos’s lens is interwar America, which was for many refugees a Promised Land. People believed such things out of innocence, notes Angelopoulos in a related interview, looking as they were for a way out of their poverty. The Weeping Meadow thus unfolds as a threnody of discovery, an awakening to the mutually exclusive powers of earth and sky.

It follows the coming of age of Eleni, an orphaned foundling who falls in love with her adoptive brother Alexis, with whom she elopes after marrying his widowed father, Spyros. In the years leading up to World War II, Alexis goes to America to pursue his dreams of becoming a renowned musician, leaving Eleni to wash her tired, solemn feet in the basin of fascist repression.

As is de rigueur in Angelopoulos’s cinema, the way he tells his stories is just as significant as the stories themselves. This is nowhere truer than in the soundtrack.

What Karaindrou has done is to treat the film’s events as births and nurture them into being. Thus animated, they take on new flesh and politics. In this regard, the titular main theme is among the most representative of all she has written. Its seesawing melodies and river-run exposition move like the eternal dance that is her spirit. In the accordion we can hear Alexis’s aspirations, can feel a lure that stretches across the Atlantic and into the heart of his as-yet-unrequited passage.

“Theme of the uprooting” shines harp with cello through a prism of deeper hue. It is one of many intimate pairings throughout the program, each an expression of Eleni and Alexis splashed across the atlas of time to which they are ever subordinate.

This sensation of helplessness turns visceral through the voiceover, which marks what we are about to see as choreography on a vast stage. “Scene 1,” the voice begins, establishing a self-aware, non-diegetic world in which we are but fleeting, curious spectators. Along the banks of Thessaloniki—“a wound that will not heal”—a mass of humanity approaches, torn yet regardful. Life as they once knew it is gone, as threadbare and uncertain as they are.

“Waiting” holds true to this tension, wrapping its wings around Eleni’s unfathomable resolve, which liquefies in her arrest. As water drips from her hands like tears (an image that recurs in the trilogy’s second part, The Dust of Time), she becomes life itself, percolating through crack of stone and pocket of soil into the earth’s molten core.

Eleni’s twin soul resides in “The tree,” another recurring melody that stands as the only reminder of community. Its lachrymose branches have shed their leaves long ago. In their place are strains of accordion, piano, and lyra…fish swimming in murky waters. The single tree is a living cipher, a leitmotif akin to the sapling in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Although more often looming in the distance of the refugees’ makeshift settlement…

…up close it is ornamented with animal carcasses: not an omen of what will be, but of what might have been.

When the settlement is flooded and puts those nomadic hearts back on the line, it weeps in their absence. For as democracy commits suicide all around them, its roots are the only ones left.

“Young man’s theme” is another of the soundtrack’s more character-driven pieces. Its interlocking circles of accordion, lyra, and harp weave a thinly veiled portrait of the film’s love triangle, which like an all-seeing eye penetrates the viewer in return. That gaze is as prolific as it is omnipresent. From the long pan over riverbanks worn by wheel of cart and sole of shoe to the silent epidemic that offers Alexis’s mother to the talons of a bird of deathly shade, it watches until things drown. It reminds us that Alexis has already wounded Eleni with a family she can never have (when we encounter her as a teenager her twin boys, born in secret, have already been adopted out). Upon her return, Alexis goes to Eleni in the night and asks her, “Remember when we used to say we’d follow the river to the find the source?” He is too young to realize that Eleni has been that source all along. Although they have shared a moment through the window, separated by songs of men, being together means that some form of shattering is inevitable.

That each of the above themes has its variations reminds us that constellations are never fixed. They are the changing of the guard from day into dusk, an enigmatic realization of that unflagging gaze. All of which makes the standalone pieces glow with their potency of message.

Anchored by a violin solo that invokes Karaindrou’s theme for Ulysses’ Gaze, “Memories” caresses the garments of a loved one who has passed. Here we find pause and reflection for the wayfaring mind. The quiet tide of strings barely touches the shore before an emotional sponge dabs it away as if it were but a tear on the face of an immeasurable deity.

“On the road” spins an even more reflective pathos, its wheels turning in search of traction and finding it only the choir of “Prayer.” Therein lies the film’s most abrasive benediction. It weeps neither for itself nor for us, but for those who do not know, those we can never know, those without name in places without time. It encompasses Eleni’s resilience tenfold: her spying on the twin boys, drawn into a web at conservatory; her flight with Alexis into the shelter of a sympathetic theater troupe, and Spyros’s vengeful shame at knowing his pride is lost; the final dance before Spyros collapses, never to breathe again; his watery pyre, floating somewhere between the fantasy he could never endure and the reality that substitutes his existence with sticks and decay.

Simply calling Karaindrou’s sound-world “cinematic” is as misguided as calling the sky blue, for it too fades to black when the day is over. Despite its fictional ties, its shapes are as real as the musicians who bring it to life. It is, rather, an amorphous body of tears and gestures, the departing ship that pulls Alexis and Eleni apart.

A red thread is all that connects, the unraveling of an unfinished garment.

After it falls into the ocean, and with it the promise of balance, Eleni returns to the old house, ruined, in the water.

Its voices have washed away. Eleni has been washed away. Everything has been washed away.

Review by Tyran Grillo, ECMreviews.com


Eleni Karaindrou - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Film by Theo Angelopoulos) (2004)



Maria Bildea, harp
Konstantinos Raptis, accordion
Socratis Sinopoulos, constantinople lyra
Vangelis Skouras, french horn
Renato Ripo, violoncello
Sergiu Nastasa, violin
Angelos Repapis, double-bass
String Orchestra La Camerata Athens
Eleni Karaindrou, piano
Antonis Kontogeorgiou, choirmaster

Recorded June 2003 at Studio Polysound, Athens

Tracklist:

01. The Weeping Meadow (3:56)
02. Theme of the Uprooting I (1:08)
03. Waiting 1 (4:18)
04. Memories (3:34)
05. The Tree (2:43)
06. Young Man's Theme I (1:56)
07. The Weeping Meadow I (3:23)
08. Theme of the Uprooting II (1:18)
09. Waiting II (2:03)
10. Theme of the Uprooting (3:07)
11. Prayer (4:14)
12. The Tree (2:45)
13. On the Road (3:38)
14. Young Man's Theme (2:11)
15. Theme of the Uprooting III (1:10)
16. The Weeping Meadow II (2:38)


Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008

EAC extraction logfile from 14. April 2008, 22:50

Eleni Karaindrou / The Weeping Meadow

Used drive : PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W5224A Adapter: 4 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 30
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : Yes
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 768 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : c:\Program Files\Tools CD\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -o %d –best %s


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
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3 | 5:04.30 | 4:18.00 | 22830 | 42179
4 | 9:22.30 | 3:34.36 | 42180 | 58265
5 | 12:56.66 | 2:42.56 | 58266 | 70471
6 | 15:39.47 | 1:56.28 | 70472 | 79199
7 | 17:36.00 | 3:23.09 | 79200 | 94433
8 | 20:59.09 | 1:18.26 | 94434 | 100309
9 | 22:17.35 | 2:02.38 | 100310 | 109497
10 | 24:19.73 | 3:06.71 | 109498 | 123518
11 | 27:26.69 | 4:14.14 | 123519 | 142582
12 | 31:41.08 | 2:44.61 | 142583 | 154943
13 | 34:25.69 | 3:38.04 | 154944 | 171297
14 | 38:03.73 | 2:10.69 | 171298 | 181116
15 | 40:14.67 | 1:10.13 | 181117 | 186379
16 | 41:25.05 | 2:38.15 | 186380 | 198244


Range status and errors

Selected range

Filename D:\Music.wrk\ripped\Eleni Karaindrou\The Weeping Meadow\CDImage.wav

Peak level 94.5 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC 7A093BE8
Copy OK

No errors occurred


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15 track(s) could not be verified as accurate
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You may have a different pressing from the one(s) in the database

End of status report

[CUETools log; Date: 05.05.2017 20:16:35; Version: 2.1.4]
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8 | (42/43) Accurately ripped
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12 | (42/43) Accurately ripped
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[AccurateRip ID: 001abf95-013e1406-e10a5310] found.
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foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2017-05-05 23:03:13

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Eleni Karaindrou / The Weeping Meadow
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR11 -0.49 dB -14.53 dB 3:56 01-The Weeping Meadow
DR11 -3.57 dB -20.08 dB 1:08 02-Theme of the Uprooting I
DR14 -4.91 dB -22.81 dB 4:18 03-Waiting 1
DR12 -4.41 dB -22.09 dB 3:34 04-Memories
DR12 -3.76 dB -21.09 dB 2:43 05-The Tree
DR11 -8.16 dB -23.48 dB 1:56 06-Young Man's Theme I
DR11 -2.45 dB -21.69 dB 3:23 07-The Weeping Meadow I
DR11 -2.35 dB -19.44 dB 1:18 08-Theme of the Uprooting II
DR11 -4.12 dB -20.40 dB 2:03 09-Waiting II
DR12 -3.81 dB -20.88 dB 3:07 10-Theme of the Uprooting
DR11 -1.74 dB -18.96 dB 4:14 11-Prayer
DR12 -3.76 dB -21.08 dB 2:45 12-The Tree
DR12 -5.77 dB -22.54 dB 3:38 13-On the Road
DR11 -2.62 dB -19.50 dB 2:11 14-Young Man's Theme
DR11 -3.57 dB -20.27 dB 1:10 15-Theme of the Uprooting III
DR13 -3.55 dB -24.19 dB 2:38 16-The Weeping Meadow II
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 16
Official DR value: DR12

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 583 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

Eleni Karaindrou - Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Film by Theo Angelopoulos) (2004)

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