The album’s title is
deceptively straightforward. It describes
the temporal and geographical sphere
but the complexities of the music of
the Jewish Diaspora is one to which
Vladimir Ivanoff’s notes do full and
absorbing justice. Jews reached the
Iberian Peninsula in the Roman times
and they lived unusually unhindered
lives until the expulsion of 1492. Inevitably
the dispersal, to Italy, France and
Germany was augmented by further exile
to Egypt, Syria and Palestine and other
sovereign states of the Ottoman Empire.
The Sephardic Jews took with them their
music, nurtured in Spain, and to a greater
or lesser extent sought to maintain
their Spanish traditions, but in time
they became influenced by their host
traditions, and a variety of new rhythmic
and modal aspects accreted to the original
songs. In time the Western and Eastern
Mediterranean traditions became independent,
hence the dichotomous title of this
disc, which reflects the divergence
of the original tradition, the two ways
in which Sephardic Jewry made music.
Prominent in the tradition
is the solo female voice and the locus
classicus of the music was the Spanish
Romance, though this was augmented by
a variety of lullabies, cradle and wedding
songs. Here the group Sarband have augmented
these original Judeo-Hispanic songs
with later examples from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and creative
examples of the Balkan inheritance.
The band consists of two female singers
and a four piece instrumental ensemble
augmented by Ivanoff who also plays
percussion and lute. The Balkan selection
of the disc opens with some wedding
songs; the first is quite stridently
sung, I assume, by Fadia El-Hage whereas
the third is couched more in the early
twentieth century salon vernacular and
sung – again it’s a reasoned assumption
- by Belinda Sykes. This type of juxtaposition
sets up the kind of resonances that
sound throughout the disc; the historical,
the refracted, the living tradition
that stretches through continents and
centuries.
The instrumental accompaniment
is various and colours the songs – flutes,
kettle drums, the psaltery, fiddle,
lute and a battery of percussion. El-Hage
displays a coloratura and control of
the melismatic writing that are both
mightily impressive, not least in the
Bulgarian Romanze, whereas Sykes deploys
her more expressive lyric voice in the
spare Anderleto. There are interesting
interludes along the way, the rather
Dowland-like piece by the sixteenth
century Pisador, the more obviously
"Spanish" rhythms of Gerineldo,
and the early twentieth century "Western
Jewish" sounds that begin to emerge.
This is something of
a voyage, musically and geographically,
and it’s accompanied by fine and elegant
notes, a sympathetic acoustic and very
nicely produced artwork.
Jonathan Woolf
Ensemble Sarband/Vladimir Ivanoff