There Is Home - CD

This album by Bella Adamova and Michael Gees explores the search for a true home and the feeling that there is a place in the world where one belongs. It combines selected songs from Modest Mussorgsky’s Nursery, Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, Benjamin Britten’s Folksong Arrangements and Pavel Haas’s Four Songs to Words from Chinese Poetry, along with improvisations based on texts by Anna Akhmatova, Pablo Neruda, Heinz-Albert Heindrichs, Marie Howe, Klára Goldstein and Bella Adamova. Bella Adamova can be described through her competition distinctions, including laureate of the International Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau in 2021, winner of Franz Schubert and Modern Music in Graz in 2022, and recipient of the Oratorio Prize at the International Vocal Competition in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2022. She is also a Chechen woman who left her homeland with her family in early childhood shortly before the war and found a new home in Prague. She studied with numerous masters, including von Otter, Hampson and Prégardien, in England, Switzerland and Germany. An alto with an exceptional feeling for song literature and a beautifully coloured, deep-set voice, she also improvises with pianist Michael Gees, creating spontaneous compositions in rare harmony from texts by poets close to them. Adamova sings these songs as her own story, highlighting the authors’ life stories and their relationship with home or their sense of displacement. Rather than a conventional song recital, the recording invites listeners into her world, where every word, sung in any language, has deep meaning.