Review | Songlines

Jaipur to Cairo

Rating: ★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Cuatro Puntos Resident Musicians

Label:

Métier Records

October/2019

Using traditional music as the medium to compose Western classical music, Jaipur to Cairo is a collection of works by little-known composers Reza Vali, Kevin Bishop, Sadie Harrison, Gilad Cohen and Mohamed-Aly Farag for various ensembles, centred around the medium of string quartet or quintet. The opening track ‘Jaunpuri (Morning Song)’ is by far the highlight, featuring a searing beauty, serene lushness and calm so akin to its influence from Hindustani music. It's a shame then that the remainder of the album falls short of this promising opening. Perhaps it's the slightly austere, heavily academic and ‘experimental’ treatment of the material that creates a disappointing emotional detachment.

Extended techniques, sustained dissonance and quirky phrasing largely feature in most pieces, all reminiscent of the avant-garde (listen to ‘Ten Variations for Oboe, Piano & Strings’ for example). More to the point, Sadie Harrison's ‘The Oldest Song in the World’, a reworking of Arab traditional music, sadly loses something of the emotional weight that connects audiences to the ‘original’ tradition. ‘Rhapsody for Piano & Strings’ is a more successful warm embrace of Egyptian traditions, though perhaps more in a way recognisable to music lovers of Stravinsky than fans of Egyptian classical music.

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