ELENI KARAINDROU Tous des oiseaux

Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou’s entrancing new album draws upon music created for two special projects: Tous des oiseaux, a play by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, and Bomb, A Love Story, a film by Iranian actor-director Payman Maadi.
Tous des oiseaux (English title: All Birds), described as “an epic fresco” set against the background of the Israel-Palestine conflict, has won great acclaim for its bold exploration of the complex web of cultural identity.  Premiered at Paris’s Théâtre national de la Colline in November 2017, the play - with Karaindrou’s music as an integral component - has been a major success with press and public. Karaindrou has said of Tous des oiseaux that it opened new horizons and broadened her perceptions, “creating within me images and feelings unknown.”  The play has since gone on to travel the world, with performances scheduled in 2019 from Tel Aviv to Montréal.

Meanwhile, Bomb, Eleni Karaindrou’s first new cinematic collaboration since the death of Theo Angelopoulos, has been nominated for an Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Original Score. Both works, Tous des oiseaux and Bomb, feature compositions for string orchestra, sensitively directed by Argyro Seira, and for Karaindrou’s cast of gifted soloists, here augmented by players of traditional instruments. The archaic tones of kanonaki, lyra and ney are juxtaposed against the texture of Eleni’s writing as well as highlighted in their own right. In what is now a thirty-year tradition, extending back to the Music for Films recording of 1990, Karaindrou’s evocative themes and arrangements acquire new contours and continuity through the mixing and editing of producer Manfred Eicher.  Then, as Eleni puts it in the CD booklet, “we arrive at a new creation which, in some mysterious manner, touches the essence of the works for which the music was originally composed.”

In the music written for Tous les oiseaux, “Winds of War” features the distinctive voice of Savina Yannatou, later heard unaccompanied on “Lament”, delivering a variation of a traditional Greek song, dating back to the 13th century. Several of Eleni’s soloists, including lyra player and lutenist Sokratis Sinopoulos, oboist Vangelis Christopoulos, flautist Stella Gadedi, harpist Maria Bildea and accordionist Dinos Hadjiiordanou have come to be familiar presences in the music, a cast of characters to be combined in changing constellations.

In her writing for the film Bomb, Karaindrou foregrounds Yannis Evangelatos’s bassoon (“an instrument I especially love”), and adds Aris Dimitriadis on mandolin. The Bomb music also benefits significantly from Eleni’s sensitive piano playing, featured more prominently here than on other Karaindrou recordings of recent vintage.

Kim Kashkashian / Jan Garbarek / Vangelis Christopoulos ELENI KARAINDROU Concert in Athens

“Each of my compositions seems to be part of a mosaic which takes on its ultimate form very slowly through the years”, Eleni Karaindrou once said, and the larger picture becomes both clearer and more finely-detailed with each new album.  Concert in Athens is her tenth release on ECM.  It is an exceptional documentation of a performance from 2010, marking a triumphant return to the Athens Concert Hall, the setting for the “Elegy of the Uprooting” shows five years earlier.

A new programme offers new insights, particularly when participating friends include guest soloists Jan Garbarek and Kim Kashkashian, both of whom have made major contributions to the realization of Karaindrou’s work in the past – Garbarek with his evocative playing of the themes for The Beekeeper (reprised on the album Music for Films) and Karaindrou as the key musical protagonist of Ulysses’ Gaze. Over the years both artists have periodically returned to join Eleni for special events.  Ulysses’ Gaze and Beekeeper themes are reprised here, along with music from other films of the late Theo Angelopoulos  -  Dust of Time, Eternity and a day,  Landscape in the Mist and Journey to Cythera, all of them revealing new facets as Kashkashian and Garbarek are featured  alongside Eleni’s team of soloists (with oboist Vangelis Christopoulos especially  striking).  There is also much here that is new or heard on CD for the first time including compositions originally written for theatre productions directed by Antonis Antypas including Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams as well as Jules Dassin’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  The differing demands of the theatre music open up a new emotional range for the soloists to explore. Eleni:  “I sought to share with them memories from past and more recent voyages in the worlds of theatre and poetry.  With Jan I plunged deep into the fascination and torment of Arthur Miller, of Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams...” The album opens and closes with Garbarek’s intensely brooding saxophone, accompanied by Karaindrou’s piano and the string orchestra, playing the “Requiem for Willie Loman” from Death of a Salesman. Meanwhile, “Kim’s sturdy and sensitive bow swept us on a journey to Laurä’s fragile world in The Glass Menagerie, having first traversed the Closed Roads [one of several newly-arranged pieces of Karaindrou concert music] with all the passion and unmatched internal nobility which distinguish her work.” The scope of the music is further expanded with three charming miniatures inspired by M. Karagatsis’s novel “Number Ten ,  and written for the Greek television series of the same name. (ECM Records)