Music for Shepherds and Sultans

The ensemble here is violin (Michalis Kouloumis), oud (Tristan Driessens) and frame drums (Miriam Encinas), and the idea is to juxtapose Ottoman classical music with Cypriot folk. The former is stately and slow, while the latter is upbeat and fun, so I’m more for the shepherds than the sultans.

The two traditions share modal forms and Kouloumis’ Cypriot violin playing with its distinctive swoops and ornamentations is the highlight. The overall mood of this album is scholarly, polite and crisply clean but more tracks like the foot-tapping ‘Patrunino’ with its overtones of Serbian favourite ‘Ajde Jano’ would be welcome. However, the light-to-shadow transition from ‘Patrunino’ to the Sultan-style ‘Köyde Sabah’ is striking and contains some plangent violin. The final tracks of instrumental taksim improvisations on violin and oud seem rather like an afterthought.