L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Mediterraneo (2013) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata invite you on a musical cruise that will take you from Portugal to Turkey, following the coasts of Spain, Catalonia, Greece and Italy, caressed by the rocking of the waves and the captivating dialogue between traditional plucked instruments of the Mediterranean region – the qanun, saz, Greek lyre and lavta, the oud and Portuguese guitar – and the Baroque strings of L’Arpeggiata.

Mediterraneo is a musical exploration of the Mediterranean Sea. It features the fabulous voices of Misia, Nuria Rial, Vincenzo Capezzuto, Raquel Andueza and Katerina Papadopoulou who perform traditional tarantellas, sung in Greek. Those folk pieces were a custom in the Baroque era in the Greek-Albanian villages of Calabria. Join Christina Pluhar on this unique musical odyssey.

This release by the early music group L’Arpeggiata and its leader, lutenist Christina Pluhar, seems to encompass two separate goals, only partly laid out in the handsomely illustrated booklet notes. First is an illustration of the idea that, as the notes put it, “the sea does not separate cultures, it connects them.” Jordi Savall and others have released albums that cut across a wide swath of Mediterranean lands from Turkey to Spain (and around to Portugal), finding in them a traditional music that responds well to improvisatory practice, shows the continuing influence of musical practices from the Arab and Ottoman worlds, and reflects a lyric impulse and a tendency toward accompanied vocal song. Pluhar adds different singers and musicians onto her core group according to the national origin of the music, a noteworthy and innovative practice that gets the listener to hear commonalities and differences in a fresh way. The second goal is more unusual: Pluhar and company explore the common roots of these practices in Greek music, demonstrated by the persistence of the Greek language and a large repertory of orally transmitted song in southern Italy, on the Salento peninsula on the east coast of southern Italy, and also in Calabria. These songs are sung in a language called Griko, essentially an Italian dialect of Greek. This music, and even the language itself, is sufficiently obscure to attract attention to the album by themselves, and “Greco-Salentino” songs, with everything transliterated and translated in the booklet, are lovely. The album’s perhaps of a bit more interest to speculative world music fans than to serious devotees of old Mediterranean song: Pluhar’s female vocalists don’t have quite the power needed to take command of the material. But the instrumental group L’Arpeggiata is a remarkably flexible, breathing instrument, and the entire project gets major points for sheer originality. –AllMusic Review by James Manheim

Tracklist:
01. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Are mou rindineddha (04:35)
02. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Sem saber (03:26)
03. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Hasapiko (02:18)
04. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Tres sirenas (03:41)
05. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Hicâz Mandira (04:42)
06. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Pizzica di San Vito (02:20)
07. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Amygdalaki tsakisa (04:19)
08. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – La Dama d’Aragó (03:40)
09. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Amor de mel, amor de fel (03:05)
10. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Günes & ay (03:37)
11. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – De Santanyí vaig partir (03:57)
12. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Rosa negra no meu peito (02:43)
13. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Thalassa lypisou (03:34)
14. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Oriamu Pisulina (03:05)
15. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – O Pajem (03:28)
16. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Sfessania (02:57)
17. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Agapimu fidela protini (03:08)
18. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Cantigas de portugueses (02:57)
19. L’Arpeggiata, Christina Pluhar – Los delfines (04:28)

Personnel:
Mísia, voice (Portugal)
Nuria Rial, soprano (Catalonia)
Raquel Andueza, soprano (Spain)
Vincenzo Capezzuto, voice (Italy)
Katerina Papadopoulou, voice (Greece)
L’Arpeggiata:
Christina Pluhar, theorbo, direction
Doron Sherwin, cornett
Margit Übellacker, psaltery
Sarah Ridy, baroque harp
Marcello Vitale, baroque guitar, chitarra battente
Quito Gato, guitar
David Mayoral, percussion
Francesco Turrisi, harpsichord, percussion
Boris Schmidt, double bass
Special guests:
Sandro Daniel Costa, Portuguese guitar (Portugal)
Daniel Pinto, fado viola (Portugal)
Sokratis Sinopoulos, lyra (Greece)
Nikolaos Mermigkas, lavta (Greece)
Aytaç Dogan, qanun (Turkey)
Ismail Tunçbilek, saz (Turkey)