Various Artists - Wind Blows from the East: Four German / Various - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Various Artists - Wind Concertos / Various [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/30/2004

This third album of Arianna Savall and Petter Udland Johansen with their ensemble Hirundo Maris on Carpe Diem Records is a musical journey along coasts and oceans, an ode to seafarers and travelers from ancient and modern times, to their lives, hopes and dreams. The windrose points into all cardinal points, encompassing all different cultures and places on earth in it's movement. At the same time, it can be a symbol for the inner travels of the human soul which may aim into all different directions and places throughout life. In this sense, the songs on this album connect inner and outer journeying through music and poetry, just as countries and people are connected through oceans, currents, and winds.

Saxophonist par excellence Rolf-Erik Nystrøm is at the helm of Oriental Winds of the Baroque - exploring Baroque music through it's connections with the Orient, Africa, South-America and the Nordic regions. Biber, Merula and Monteverdi's passacaglias are as much a common denominator for interaction between different cultures as the blues. The European art music in the baroque era did not suddenly appear in a magic fountain in the centre of Europe around 1600. Quite the opposite; it developed through immigration, conquest, assimilation, curiosity and openness. Oriental Winds of the Baroque follow these lines backwards, open to what might turn up. Biber's re-tuning the strings and using improvisation in his music, is closely connected to how the folk musicians all over Europe worked, especially in Norway. Furthermore the tonality of the traditional religious songs in Norway, is sometimes similar to the way religious and other music is sung in the Middle East. Kouame Sereba's timeless vocals, dodo and kalimba can together with the Italian theorbo and the Norwegian traditional Hardanger fiddle give the listener associations to the curious intercultural meetings that became the origins to the later stylized baroque and classical music, and then in turn our other Western musical styles. The calm and breath in the music of Couperin is found in the aesthetics of the breath and space in the individual expressions of Sereba, Økland and Nystrøm.