Echoes of the Mountains

This and several other new recordings are a collaboration between the Canadian label Analekta and the Centre des Musiciens du Monde in Montréal. In an enviable project, world artists in Canada are given rehearsal and studio time, a showcase and an album to create new work. This one involves Peruvian charango player Federico Tarazona and Iranian kamancheh player Showan Tavakol, a combination I suspect has not been tried before. But the plucked charango and bowed kamancheh obviously make suitably contrasted partners, the former more ebullient, the latter more soulful. Both musicians are sublime.

The album opens with a kamancheh melody picked up by the charango and the two converse before starting to interact. This ‘Dialogue Kurde-Andin’ is a fine prelude reaching a strong climax. There are two solo tracks, ‘L'Aube de Gabriel’ on charango and ‘Épopée de Simorgh’ on kamancheh, but the duos are most interesting – the curiously experimental ‘Cahargah’, ‘Échos des Montagnes’ (a meeting of the Andes and Zagros) and ‘Carnaval Ayacupersa’ in which the carnival migrates from Peru to Persia. As always with these collaborations, it's not so much the connection of the two disparate traditions but the compatibility of the two musicians that counts.