Mare Nostrum

Jordi Savall is a leading specialist in early music, the styles of the 12th to 18th century. In those times more than half of the Mediterranean coast, including those of a part of Europe, were Arab or Ottoman and a lot of natural cultural crossovers took place, notably in Spain and the Balkans. Over the years Savall undertook to explore the historical fusion of the musical cultures of those regions. Sadly, this album became a swansong for Savall's wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras, who recently passed away. On this double album she delivered some of her most evocative singing. Fluently as ever, she manoeuvres her voice through deceptively simple Sephardic lullabies, dazzling microtonal Arabic melismas and virtuoso early European coloraturas.

A point of criticism is that, in the tendency to demonstrate all the cultures cohabitating around the Mediterranean, the parts sung in Hebrew, Turkish and Ladino Spanish dominate, underexposing Arabic culture. One of the Hebrew songs is attributed to the renowned Moroccan Rabbi David Buzaglo, who wrote piyyutim in Hebrew and Arabic and who was beloved among both Jewish and Muslim Moroccans. It would have been a groundbreaking deed to include one of his hymns in Arabic, or in mixed language, as was Buzaglo's practice. The album concludes with a song by the young family member Ferran Savall in a contemporary jazz mood: a poem about the future of the Mediterranean. It is a heart-felt testimony of hope for the region, and of the need for the family to move on.