MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


 REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

alternatively
CD: Crotchet


Dreams of Andalusia
Jadaka l-ghaithu’idha l-ghaithu hama [1:36]
Yahnikum, yahnikum [4:51]
Miyyah fi miyyah [7:25]
Macar ome per folia [8:17]
Por fol tenno quen na [3:00]
Al pasar por Casablanca [6:59]
Hal dara zabyu l-hima [2:39]
Estampida Instrumental [3:56]
Masha s-sahar hayran [3:27]
Ayyuha s-saqi ’ilay-ka l-mushtaka [7:20]
Como poden per sas culpas [3:07]
Jarriri l-dheila ’ayuma jarri [1:11]
A Sennor que mui ben soube [6:44]
Quen bõa dona querrá [3:33]
Joglaresa: Naziha Azzouz (voice), Belinda Sykes (voice, shawm, bagpipes), Stuart Hall (oud, tar), Ben Davis (vielle), Paul Clarvis (bendir, Andalusian tar), Tim Garside (darabuka, Andalusian tar), Salah Dawson Miller (bendir, Andalusian tar); Hilary Hazard, Lucy Gibson, Wendy March, Sonia Ritter (voice, on ‘A Sennor que mui ben soube’ only.
rec. 27-29 January 2000, East Woodhay Church.
Texts and translations included.
METRONOME METCD1062 [64:10]
Experience Classicsonline


The learned Benedictine nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim (c.935-c.1002), poet and dramatist, described the Andalusia of her time as “the ornament of the world”. She had never visited Andalusia, but had no need to do so to be fully conscious of its reputation for scholarship and artistic creativity. And for what, sadly, now seems a remarkable degree of religious tolerance and cultural interaction. From the middle of the eighth century until the fifteenth, Islamic, Christian and Jewish populations lived in relative harmony with one another. Their various cultural traditions - in such matters as philosophy, mathematics and science as well as in the arts and such arts of living as food and clothes - coexisted in complex patterns of mutual influence. María Rosa Menocal borrowed Hroswitha’s phrase for the title of her fascinating and accessible book published in 2002: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. It is the musical dimension of this ‘ornament of the world’ that Belinda Sykes and Joglaresa explore on this CD, recorded as long ago as January 2000 but only now released.

Belinda Sykes, director of Joglaresa and the musical mind behind this anthology, certainly approaches the repertoire of the period in the spirit of cultural interaction. The emphasis is upon the strophic song with a refrain (a model which spread throughout Europe from Andalusia), which existed in two major verse forms, the muwashshah (written in classical Arabic) and the zajal (written in an Arabic dialect peculiar to Andalusia). Although a healthy selection of poetic texts of such songs survive in Arabic, as do texts for the Hebrew and Christian songs (such as the famous Cantigas de Santa Maria), we have far fewer musical records where the Arabic and Hebrew songs are concerned. To make possible the performance of such Arabic texts, Sykes and her colleagues have sometimes resorted to fitting the text to a surviving medieval Christian melody or to a traditional Arab-Andalusian melody; elsewhere they make use of a traditional melody to which the particular text is still sung (and which may, conceivably, be a direct descendant of the original melody); sometimes they rely upon improvisation within the conventions of such medieval Arab-Andalusian music as we do have.

The results are generally very impressive. With plenty of percussion, with some fiercely reedy instrumental accompaniment and some fine work on the oud and the vielle - plus, of course, the voices of Naziha Azzouz and Belinda Sykes herself, powerful but capable of appropriate subtlety - these songs communicate their sentiments vigorously and the performances are never short of energy. For the most part only a single pitched instrument is used at any one time, and this allows a degree of intimacy and freedom in the interplay between voice(s) and melodic accompaniment, both supported by the hyperactive (but never over-fussy) percussion section. There would, of course, be plenty of room for scholarly debate about the ‘authenticity’ of much that can be heard on this CD. But these are performances that have (irrespective of any such debate) their own kind of authenticity, their own truth to human emotion, to musical intuition and (where the resources exist) to scholarly information. Belinda Sykes is both an experienced performer in a range of musical traditions and Professor of Medieval Song at Trinity College of Music. Were she only the one or the other - intuitive performer or scholar - the performances would undoubtedly be rather less satisfying than they are. The sung texts here vary from the praise of the Virgin Mary to the celebration of the “love’s intoxication” and Joglaresa find apt language for these and for many other sentiments. Sometimes the fusion of sources strikes unexpected sparks; so, for example, the text of a poem by Ibn Quzman of Cordoba (c.1080-1160) is sung to a traditional Algerian melody and in a rhythmic mode taken from the folk music of the Maghreb; or, to take another example, a poem by Don Todros Abulafia of Castile (1247-1306) is sung to the melody of one of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (No.40) - the text of the Arabic poem is a woman’s praise of her lover’s character, that of the Christian song it ‘replaces’ is a hymn in praise of the Virgin. Time and again, these performers make such combinations work, as they effect their own kind of convivencia.

The recorded sound is good and does justice to the fascinating percussive textures that distinguish so much in the programme. The motif of cultural interplay and layering is nicely enhanced by the fact that this recording was made in the late Georgian church of St. Martin of Tours in East Woodhay.

Glyn Pursglove 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.