Plenty of composers borrow from folk traditions. Far fewer have a working relationship with the place the tradition actually comes from. Ilya Levinson’s music has been performed by the Sarajevo Philharmonic, and that detail puts “Sevdah Medley” on different footing than most classical engagements with regional folk material. This isn’t someone encountering something unfamiliar from a comfortable distance.
Levinson has been based in Chicago since 1988, working as a composer, pianist and educator, and his catalog stretches across opera, musical theatre, symphonic and chamber writing, film scores, and music written for the stage. Beyond Sarajevo, his work has been taken up by the Russian State Philharmonic Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and performed throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Sevdah Medley
Some context on the source material helps here. Sevdalinka is a Bosnian song form, and the word sevdah at its center doesn’t file love and sorrow into separate drawers the way English tends to. It holds both simultaneously. Songs in the tradition tend to sit in that unresolved ache rather than settling toward anything tidier, which is precisely what makes the form difficult to move into a concert setting without losing the thing that matters about it.
That tension is what Levinson is working with. The piece carries Sevdalinka’s emotional vocabulary into a contemporary classical frame, and the interesting question it raises is how little the tradition seems to need to change in order to survive the journey. Rather than reconstructing old songs as artifacts, the work engages with the feelings that kept those songs in circulation across generations in the first place.
None of this is a one-off detour, which is part of why it convinces. Levinson has spent decades on vernacular music. He co-founded the New Budapest Orpheum Society, the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago, and still serves as its music director; their focus is Jewish cabaret, and their album “As Dreams Fall Apart,” covering Jewish stage and film music from 1925 through 1955, earned a Grammy nomination in 2016. His “Klezmer Rhapsody,” recorded by the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band for Shanachie, drew praise from Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein, who found it firmly grounded in Eastern European Yiddish folk and dance music while still being genuinely enjoyable rather than solemn or reverent about itself.
The formal training behind all of it runs deep. Levinson studied composition with Alexander Pirumov and orchestration with Edison Denisov at the Moscow State Conservatory before completing doctoral work at the University of Chicago under Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran. He has written musicology as well, including “Kashchey in Blue,” tracing connections between Rimsky-Korsakov, Schillinger and Gershwin, and has scored film, among them Marian Marzynski’s PBS documentary “Shtetl.” He is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago and composer-in-residence with American Music Festivals.
Worth being clear on one point: this is a purely orchestral work. There is no vocal line anywhere in it, which is a genuine decision rather than an oversight, given that sevdalinka is fundamentally a singer’s form built around how a voice stretches and shades a phrase. Levinson scored it for chamber orchestra in 2008 and expanded it for full orchestra the following year, and in performance it sits at around the six-minute mark.
His answer to the absent voice is counterpoint. Rather than handing a traditional melody to a solo instrument and propping it up with chords, he writes new polyphonic lines around each tune, so the borrowed material ends up embedded in a texture that’s genuinely his. The transitions run on the same principle, with different sevdah songs set against one another as one hands off to the next, and he brings the technique back to close the piece out.
There’s a clear emotional architecture to how the orchestra gets used, too. Solo instrumental passages carry the private, interior end of the material, while full ensemble writing handles the communal weight the tradition deals in. Each song arrives dressed in a different combination of orchestral colour and register, which is how a medley avoids collapsing into a playlist. Studying orchestration under Edison Denisov, a composer genuinely preoccupied with timbre, reads as relevant training here rather than incidental biography.
There’s also a musical logic to Levinson arriving at sevdah by way of klezmer that runs deeper than both simply being folk traditions. The two share Ottoman and Eastern European modal ancestry, so a composer already fluent in the scales and ornamentation of one comes to the other with a real head start rather than starting cold.
The piece has had a genuine performance life since it was written, performed by the Sarajevo Philharmonic under Phil Simmons at the National Theatre of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2009 and by the Chicago Sinfonietta under Mei-Ann Chen a decade later, and the current recording comes from the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, released through Navona Records on the collection “Legends and Light Vol. 4.”
What that adds up to is a composer with both the technical equipment and the temperament for this kind of work, someone who treats a folk tradition as a living language rather than material to be quoted.
Final Thoughts
“Sevdah Medley” is worth the time of anyone drawn to classical music that reaches outside its own borders, and it makes a persuasive case that a tradition doesn’t have to be preserved under glass to be respected.
You can find Ilya Levinson on his official website. Stay tuned to MusicOnTheRox.com for all your music news and reviews.
