A Soul With Thirteen Strings

Recently Rostok Records issued The Real Breath CD of lute music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played by Anatoly Shpakov. The program includes 44 miniatures by English, German, Italian, Polish, French, and Czech composers. Most of them were undeservedly forgotten and are not very popular with the modern audience.

Playing old music is not an easy way for a performer. Not everybody can feel the breath of faraway epochs and find ways able to show a modern listener all the primordial nature of emotions and moods that once existed. Anatoly Shpakov was lucky to turn the lute into what it had long been: an instrument to which one’s most intimate feelings are confided. In Shpakov’s hands the lute finds its primary destination. It is able to distract one’s mind from sad thoughts, to tell of secret sorrows, or cheer one up with a dance. Let us not forget that in those years sometimes the fates of countries were at stake in court talks accompanied by the sounds of gavottes and minuets. Thus the lute can be considered a living witness to and participant in history.

Let us not forget also that there has long been a developed lute school in Ukraine. Our musicians often pursued their careers at the Russian court. Anatoly Shpakov knows the history of the lute in Ukraine very well. But there is one more circumstance that worries him. Recording lute music on a modern perfect equipment, it is hard to resist temptation to follow guitar stylistics and timbre features. In his work on the CD in cooperation with sound producer Mr. Shpakov managed to at most recreate the lute’s original sound. Additional evidence of the fruitfulness of this work is the label, Original Sound, which was not by accident placed on the disc cover. It is a result of thorough work and the musician’s care for the lute’s specifics. Anatoly Shpakov continues his concert activities in Ukraine as well as abroad. He has made numerous records for the Ukrainian Radio Fund. There is hope that in the future Anatoly gladdens music lovers with new remakes of his records.

THE DAY’S REFERENCE

Anatoly Shpakov is a musician boasting intensive concert activity since 1969. Primarily he was trained as a violinist. After graduating from Kyiv’s Gliere Music College he entered the Donetsk Music Pedagogical Institute and graduated as a viola player. Later he studied guitar inter alia at the Lviv State Conservatory. Since 1972, Mr. Shpakov has taught. Also in 1972 he began his career as a solo guitar and lute player and his cooperation with various music ensembles, including the Harmoniya [Harmony] Ensemble of Kyiv State Philharmonic. He has taken part in recording soundtracks for approximately five hundred feature and musical films. In some of them he appeared as a solo musician ( Anatoly Shpakov Plays, Melodies of an Old Castle, and Old Miniatures). He also arranged and edited a number of guitar songs for the collections published by the Muzychna Ukrayina [Musical Ukraine] Publishers.