Ushba: Georgian Harmonies

The group Mze Shina (Inner Sun) is actually a French quartet – three men and one woman – specialising in Georgian vocal polyphony. And they do it extremely well. While the vocal power of the big Georgian choirs, who normally sing this music, is obviously much greater, these one-to-a-part recordings have a special clarity and intimacy. The angular and idiosyncratic vocal lines come across more clearly and the female solo and male drones in the final ‘Orovela’ is gorgeous.

The group perform 24 songs from all over Georgia, several of them accompanied by panduri and chonguri lutes. Highlights include ‘Romelni Kerubimta’, a liturgical song with gorgeous vocal suspensions, ‘Varado’, a lament from Abkhazia with a tragic Caucasus mountain story behind it, and even ‘Tchakrulo’, a classic song from Kakheti, usually rendered by a mass of voices, sounds very powerful in this quartet formation with male and female vocals in harmony.