To make this album, Kudsi Erguner worked from a recording of Kani Karaca, Akagündüz Kutbay and Nezih Uzel in London in 1971. He added taksims to the ney. Poems and songs from the repertoire of Ottoman classical music, based on makams. Detailed booklet in French and English.
Although the classical traditions of the Ottoman world were not notated, that doesn't mean there is no evidence as to how it sounded in past eras. In addition to verbal description and iconography, Istanbul was visited (and even lived in) by various musically trained Europeans. Jordi Savall and his Hespèrion XXI ensemble here rely on writings of a Moldavian prince, Dimitrie Cantemir, as well as traditional pieces from various strands in the complex cultural mosaic that has made up the city of Istanbul over the centuries.
Ibn Battuta had the same significance in the Muslim world as Marco Polo in the Western countries. A relentless traveler, he deeply changed the perception of the Orient among his contemporaries and the following generations. Morocco, Mali, Egypt, Yemen, Zanzibar, India, The Maldives and China: this non-exhaustive list gives us a hint about the extraordinary journey Jordi Savall invites us on.
Listening to this selection of music from East and West so ingeniously put together by Jordi Savall is no ordinary experience. In addition to the aesthetic emotion, we feel another that is even more intense – a sense of magical communion with reconciled humanity.
One can’t help feeling that, with the simultaneous demise of both Sepharad and Al-Andalus in the second half of the 15th century, only forty years after the fall of Byzantium, some part of the human soul was also lost. Those events led to the destruction of intellectual and spiritual bridges between East and West that have never since been repaired. Once the fertile hub of our cultural universe, the Mediterranean became a battlefield and a barrier between peoples.