Landscape in The Mist

Spiros retires as a schoolteacher, his daughter is married, and he starts his annual journey with his bees to get honey from different areas. In his truck he finds a young girl who has just been abandoned and has no roots. Spiros lets her follow for a day. Seeing her difficulty in getting further hitch-hiking, he takes her back. They will meet and part several times. Later she will say that Spiros is the only one who has ever been kind to her.

An exceptional live recording, “Concert In Athens”, the tenth ECM release by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, incorporates moving performances by guests Kim Kashkashian and Jan Garbarek. The US violist and the Norwegian saxophonist have each made important contributions to Karaindrou’s music in the past, Garbarek with his playing on the film-score for The Beekeeper (“Music for Films”) and Kashkashian as the key musical protagonist of “Ulysses’ Gaze”. Themes of both those films are revisited here, amongst much that is new.

After thirty years of playing on stages all over the world from Dublin to New York, Tokyo to Sydney, premier traditional Irish band, Altan came back to the hills of Donegal to record their new album, THE GAP OF DREAMS. The 13 tracks transport the listener to the lifestyle of rural Donegal, to a time before electricity when folks would gather together in the mists of winter to tell stories, sing songs and dance into the wee hours of the night. The music lifted the locals’ spirits and helped elevate them beyond the hardships of the day like famine, conflict and emigration. It is this spirit that informed the development of the band through their many phases of growth from a duo performing in pubs to international touring and recording artists.