Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru/Maya Dunietz
Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru Played By Maya Dunietz & String Ensemble, Live In Paris
Latency DL/LP

In 1998 producer Francis Falceto launched the invaluable Éthiopiques series on the French label Buda Musique, an effort that steadily introduced the music of modern Ethiopia – particularly figures like Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke, Getachew Mekurya and Tilahun Gessesse – to the rest of the world. Over the years the series expanded its reach, whether sharing more traditional sounds or specific regional practices. With its 21st volume, released in 2006, it introduced a genuine outlier in pianist and composer Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru. The daughter of a wealthy diplomat, she spent part of her childhood at a boarding school in Switzerland, where she first learned piano, but soon her youth was wracked by instability and upheaval due to Italy’s colonial ambitions in Ethiopia, beginning in 1936. Her family was deported to the island of Asinara, near Sardinia, where they spent three years. Back in Addis Ababa she worked as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while continuing to develop her music in her own time.

In 1944 she received permission to travel to Cairo where she studied under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz. Troubled by Cairo’s climate, she returned to Ethiopia less than two years later, where she was awarded a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music. But government authorities denied her an exit visa and she fell into a deep depression, leaving music behind and devoting herself to religion. In 1948 she became a nun and lived in a monastery in northern Ethiopia for the next decade. After returning to Addis in 1958, she taught at an orphanage, while resuming her musical practice and writing many of the pieces that define her work, much of it featured on a pair of albums made in Germany in 1963. Later that decade she went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where she spent extended periods before settling in the city for good in 1984. The move secured her anonymity until the release of her Éthiopiques album. She died in 2023, aged 99.

Through its release, her music steadily reached new listeners, even appearing in film soundtracks such as 2021’s Passing. In 2017 journalist Kate Mollesen interviewed Gebru in Jerusalem, resulting in a 30 minute BBC audio documentary, The Honky Tonk Nun. In the last few years Mississippi Records has issued most of the extant recordings not contained on the Éthiopiques collection, and a documentary film on the pianist’s life is in progress.

After discovering that collection in a London record shop, Israeli pianist and composer Maya Dunietz and conductor Ilan Volkov became so riveted by the music that they tracked Gebru down at the Jerusalem monastery where she had been living for more than two decades. The encounter led to a slowly strengthening relationship between Dunietz and Gebru, which resulted in the first time book publication of many of the latter’s compositions in 2013. As their friendship grew, Gebru eventually shared her dream of creating orchestral adaptations for her solo piano works, a task which Dunietz gladly took on. Recorded in April 2024, one year after the composer’s death, this album shares some of that work, alongside some extended solo interpretations played by Dunietz – a remarkably versatile musician equally at ease in post-bop settings as she is working in classical music.

The collection opens with an orchestral arrangement of “Ballad Of The Spirits”, a 1940s piece composed by Gebru in response to her sister’s request for music to accompany festivities at the female boarding school she directed. Its delicate piano introduction is deftly transposed to a melancholic cello line which conveys the tenderness of the original, recasting its sorrowful melody for the nine-piece string ensemble. The arrangement for the same era’s “Evening Breeze” keeps piano as the main voice, with the elegant string arrangement injecting an air of European concert hall sobriety to the performance. The arrangement of 1980s piece “Spring Ode”, transcribed from a recording of Gebru playing it on a foot-pumped harmonium, gives the composition a convincing classical era treatment, celebrating its stately melody with meticulously charted order and grace.

The four remaining works are solo performances by Dunietz from the same concert, closing with an indelible account of what has become Gebru’s signature piece, “The Homeless Wanderer”, a 1963 composition that illustrates the fitful journeys of the titular figure, who plays flute melodies to tame the wildlife encountered en route.

As with all of her interpretations, Dunietz conveys an air of respect for the material, staying true to their essence while generously improvising in such a way that we can hear Gebru’s ravishing compositions in a broader context, balancing her idiosyncratic phrasing and tunefulness with a pan-European sensibility. If some of the quirky charm of the composer’s own renditions is diminished in the process, Dunietz reconsiders the music in a much broader context, enabling arrangements that help us hear Gebru as a composer of fierce originality and lyric beauty unlimited by any single tradition or regional practice.

This review appears in The Wire 491/492 along with many other reviews of new and recent releases. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.