Weimar Cabaret

Savina Yannatou's fourth ECM album is a dazzling evocation of her band's hometown, plunging deep into its rich and complex history. Once known colloquially as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thessaloniki has been home to a host of cultures, religions and ethnic communities. Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Slav-Macedonians and Pontiac Greeks have shared the city's diverse life. Yannatou gives all of them a voice, even casting an Irish song about Salonika into this multi-lingual programme in which she shines as a unique interpreter and spokeswoman for the city's ghosts. As ever, Primavera en Salonico are a delight, one of the most resourceful bands of any idiom, as they negotiate the inspired - and very varied - arrangements of Kostas Vomvolos.

In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs meet neon-lit carnival music and the wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments from car radios to metal pipes and tin cans, hence his love of Edgard Varese and Harry Partch) form a keenly individual musical universe. It has often been imitated but never replicated.

Elena Cheah, American cellist, studied at The Juilliard School and at the Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“ with Boris Pergamenschikow. As a chamber musician, she has appeared at the Aspen and Ravinia Music Festival in the United States as well as numerous renowned European festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, and the Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival; in Australia she has toured with the Streeton Trio under the auspices of the agency Musica Viva. Since 2014 she has also been a member of the Hegel Quartet.