The Master and Margarita - 2007

Małgorzata Zalewska

In September 2007, the renowned Polish harpist Małgorzata Zalewska made a CD entitled Master & Margarita. It was composed for her by Gary Guthman, a well-known American trumpeteer who has been performing jazz and so called symphony pop music for the past 20 years.

One half of the CD was created while traveling through the western United States and encompasses the ambiance and nature of the Redwood Forrest, Crater Lake, Yellowstone Park, and the Grand Canyon.

In the pieces entitled Craters Edge, Red Sky Nights, It's Time!, Crescent Moon, Love's Rose, and Be My Dream Guthman uses pop and jazz chords along with popular song formats and gentle sound effects as backdrops.

The second half of the CD is an original composition in the form of a classical/rock concerto for harp, rock band and symphony orchestra, based on The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

The composition is in four movements entitled Garden Ring, Woland's Ball, Margarita, and Manuscripts Don't Burn, and is 25 minutes in length. The concerto takes the listener through a panoply of modern chords and rock beats, with the harp melody leading the way throughout. Garden Dream is a Disneyesque entr'acte to Woland's Ball, a driving bass line and rock drum beat with a demonic waltz in the middle. Movement III, The Master and Margarita, is Stravinskyesque in nature, with a string orchestra as accompaniment to the harpist's classical bravura.