There is a moment in “Amygdalaki tsakisa” where the singing seems to lean into the music the way a sailor leans into wind — not fighting it, not surrendering, but finding the exact angle where resistance becomes propulsion. That’s the spirit animating this remarkable disc from L’Arpeggiata and Christina Pluhar, an ensemble that has made the early music world reconsider what “authentic” can possibly mean.
Pluhar’s guiding idea — that the Mediterranean is not a barrier but a highway — sounds like the sort of thing that gets stamped on grant applications and then promptly forgotten in the actual music-making. Not here. The qanun, the saz, the oud, the lavta, the Portuguese guitar: they don’t coexist politely. They argue, seduce, interrupt each other, and occasionally break into something that sounds disturbingly like the blues. Which is, when you think about it, exactly how Mediterranean port cultures have always worked.
The range is genuinely dizzying. Fado. Greek folk dance. Turkish makam. Calabrian tarantella. Catalan song. Mallorcan ballad. A lesser ensemble would produce a kind of world-music tourism — everything flattened to the same smoothly digestible pulse, the sonic equivalent of an airport gift shop. L’Arpeggiata does nothing of the kind.
“Hasapiko” whirls with an acceleration that has real physical urgency — you feel it in the sternum. “Hicaz mandira” is wayward in the best sense, its ornamentation neither Turkish nor Western but something negotiated between the two in real time. And “Pizzica di San Vito,” the Apulian tarantella traditionally associated with the bite of the wolf spider and the frenzied dancing said to cure it, arrives here with enough wild-eyed energy that you almost believe in the folk medicine.
The singing is the disc’s great glory, and it comes in radically different flavors. Nuria Rial’s voice in “La dama d’Aragó” — cool, lithe, Catalonian in its restraint — brings to mind Netania Davrath’s extraordinary accounts of the Canteloube Songs of the Auvergne, that same quality of a voice that seems to have grown directly from a particular landscape. Misia is something else entirely: her smoky, guttural instrument in “Rosa Negra” and “Amor de Mel” carries the weight of Lisbon’s longing without a gram of sentimentality. There’s a hint of Piaf in the phrasing, yes, but also that scorched, visceral quality you hear in the most throat-rasping passages of Falla’s El amor brujo — a sound that comes from somewhere south of mastery.
Vincenzo Capezzuto may be the disc’s most startling presence. His voice adapts — genuinely adapts, not merely adjusts — to whatever linguistic and emotional world the music inhabits. In “Agapimu,” paired with trumpet, he achieves something I’m not sure I can adequately describe: a kind of luminous androgyny that feels simultaneously ancient and immediate.
The improvisation “Güneş & ay” for qanun and saz briefly destabilizes everything, introducing bluesy inflections that seem to arrive from outside the disc’s established frame of reference. I’m not sure it entirely works. But then again, destabilization may be precisely the point.
A quibble worth making: Portugal sits on the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean, and including Portuguese music and musicians while invoking the mare nostrum requires a certain geographical generosity. But cultural influence has never respected coastlines, and anyone who has heard Fado will understand why Pluhar wanted it in the conversation.
The booklet essay, prefaced with “The sea does not separate cultures, it connects them,” is unusually good — the kind of writing that actually illuminates rather than merely decorates. The deluxe edition includes a bonus DVD. Get that one.
This is cross-cultural music-making that earns its ambitions. Enthusiastically recommended.
