There is a clarity to Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s music that transforms her skeletal playing into founts of emotion. It permeates every song on Éthiopiques 21, the 2006 compilation that highlighted solo piano music from four of her albums. “Mother’s Love” ambles casually, frequently punctuated by circular, trilling melodies that echo the gentle and guiding hand of an attentive mother. “The Last Tears of a Deceased” traverses passages of varying turbulence, and its most emphatic moments sound like a sudden wave of tears arriving mid-reflection. These two songs, among others she composed, were dedicated to family members who passed away. It was apt that the CD began with “The Homeless Wanderer,” about a vagabond assuaging their worries through song.
Music always had this immediate, ineffable quality for Emahoy. After an arson attempt on her family home in Addis Ababa when she was 5, she was sent by her father—a political reformer and public intellectual—to live in Switzerland. It was there that she attended her first concert. Overcome with emotion, she approached the musician to share her gratitude; he encouraged her to play the piano, which she later took up and considered her “greatest friend” during adolescence. After Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, she and her family were taken to various locales throughout their home country and Italy, eventually landing at a monastery in Mercogliano. Emahoy played the organ there, singing hymns with nuns. Over the next several years, her religious fervor grew, and she became a nun herself at Ethiopia’s Amba Geshen, a holy mountain said to host a fragment of the True Cross.
Emahoy’s itinerant life and spirituality gave shape to a singular musical sensibility mixing the Western classical composers she loved (Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss) with the Ethiopian secular and sacred music that was around her. Mississippi Records’ newest dispatch, Church of Kidane Mehret, stands out among their recent string of Emahoy reissues by focusing on her most explicitly religious batch of songs. It culls from two different LPs—the 1972 album of the same name, and 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres, which was the source for four songs on Éthiopiques—but it doesn’t reach the ecstatic highs of her best-known music. Take the longest track, the 11-minute pipe-organ epic “Via Dolorosa, XIth Station of the Cross.” Its title refers to Jesus’ crucifixion, but the drama that should be on display—of grief and hope, sorrow and glory—is nowhere to be found. Chords progress in a steady fashion, the dynamic range is limited, and every note congeals into a vague mush of sacrosanct verve.
Ultimately, the pipe organ isn’t a potent instrument in Emahoy’s hands. The melodic filigrees that characterize her work are largely absent from these pieces; those that do appear sound anonymous and inert in the middle of sustained reverberations. In the piano-based “The Garden of Gethesemanie,” which is named after the place where Jesus was betrayed, twisting melodies are suffused with sadness and solemnity, but there are sections—like when she slowly ascends chromatically—where the emotion turns fascinatingly ambiguous. Her solo piano works are musically naked, and the feelings they convey are complex; in contrast, “Via Dolorosa” is rife with sound but startlingly hollow. This is a more traditional song than we’re accustomed to hearing from Emahoy; the 1972 LP, her first on a commercial record label, was positioned as a “contribution to the welfare of the Church.” (She didn’t even feature on the A-side of the original LP, which was given over to field recordings of religious chant.)
“Prayer for Peace. Ps. 122 (Kyrie Eleison),” another staid pipe-organ piece, clarifies what is so jarring about this reissue. The spaciousness and grandiosity of these liturgical recordings preclude the sense of intimacy we have come to expect from Emahoy’s more celebrated works. A song like “Tenkou! Why Feel Sorry?” is more capable of providing serenity. The solo piano version is quietly cheery, and the take that appeared on last year’s tremendous Souvenirs was even more touching because of Emahoy’s vocals. “Why those tears in your eyes? Cheer up, for you are so young,” she sang tenderly. It’s the difference between reading a generic platitude and having a friend sit with you to talk through your troubles: There’s greater intention, more direct communication.
The other two songs from the original Church LP aren’t much better. “Ave Maria” is marred by shoddy recording quality, and the piano notes all smear together. Low fidelity isn’t exactly the issue; there’s a welcoming domesticity to a song like “Clouds Moving on the Sky,” and the high noise floor across Souvenirs only made the tracks seem more personal. “Ave Maria” is more about atmosphere, about a song’s ghostly presence. One can imagine the thrill that could arise in passages where Emahoy plays higher notes, but all that exists in the recording is the promise of greater feeling. “Spring Ode – Meskere” also suffers, this time because Emahoy plays the harmonium. The song is repetitive to a fault, sounding less economical than her other works, and the instrument—while more affecting than the pipe organ—doesn’t suit her less-is-more approach. It is hard to believe that Emahoy wanted some of her songs, like “The Jordan River Song,” to be played on harmonium or organ instead of the piano; she draws so much more meaning from the latter.
Thankfully, Church of Kidane Mehret is partly redeemed by the tracks taken from Der Sang Des Meeres. While short, “The Storm” and “Essay on Mahlet, The Prayer of Saint Yared” feature Emahoy playing the piano in typically arresting fashion. The former showcases both her love for Romantic-era composers and the way she differs from them. It’s especially loose, in form and feel, which makes sense, given that she didn’t put time signatures on her sheet music. “It depends on the day, on the mood, on the weather,” she once said of how to play her songs. The song recalls Zema, or Ethiopian liturgical chants, and the way their different modes don’t always indicate pitch as they do in the West, but instead specify performance style. This emphasis on feeling sheds light on her practice. The four-minute “Essay” reduces the polyphonic free-verse chanting heard in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church into simple, exceedingly pretty melodies. Such comforting beauty is rare across Church of Kidane Mehret, but even hearing it in brief snatches is a reminder of Emahoy’s brilliance: At her best, a few notes can cut to the core of any emotion.
