It’s incredible how much music, feeling, and changing dynamic, how many moods and melodies Leyla Romanova manages to fit into the just under five minutes that is “Fairy Tale.” Still, that is the art of the orchestral composer, an art at which she excels.
This instrumental piece is a fantasia, an epic and emotive ebb and flow of music which more than lives up to the magic suggested by its title. Ushered in on a gentle cascade of piano cascades and the distant swell of strings, the shape and motifs of the song are revealed through woodwind textures and brass tones, all managing to have their moment, none ever stealing the limelight or getting in the way of any other instrument.
Cinematic, not only in the way that most classical music can be described as being but somehow otherworldly, too. It is a world you see clearly through the music, the shifting sonics and anthemic soundscapes describing a fantastic realm of heroic quests and dark forces, majestic backdrops, and eldritch pursuits—a place where the imagination is allowed to run riot.
And all of this is conjured through the shaping of sound, yet Leyla does so in such a way that her world becomes real. It is music to lose yourself within, escape into, and dream in. When was the last time a piece of music in the pop or rock genre, the charts or mainstream, got even close to enabling you to do that?
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