A Fearful Fairy Tale is Helena Basilova’s latest solo album.  The album is dedicated to fairytales, a tribute to fantasy, and the unknown and all magical in our world. With works by Medtner, Prokofiev, Schnittke, and Myaskovsky the album depicts mystery and is used as a starting point to collaborate with other artists.

There are two words for truth in Russian: Pravda for objective truth and Ishtina for transcendental truth, that what you know but cannot explain. While Helena’s previous solo albums – with music from Janacek and Scriabin – were each in their own way quite personal to her, this time she wanted more Ishtina than Pravda. She wanted a story that was not just personal for her but representative of her. And Helena’s personal story is one of multitudes. Of departures and forgetting, discovery and loss, of glimmers of understanding, and feelings of coherence in oceans of confusing false certainties.

This collection of music is meant as a story in itself, each piece included for the power it has to forge a connection that needed the story to be forged. And so it was with the piece that inspired the album.

This album – of stories and a story in itself – is Helena’s tribute, to fairy tales and her homeland.