Escribo en el agua

This program is dedicated to the love poetry of East and West. The singers of the ensemble of Caelis invite the Iranian singer Taghi Akhbari to conduct a love debate. Two of the finest arts in the medieval world, traditional Persian singing and medieval Western singing, meet and interact. To some of the most beautiful songs of love founders and troubadours, polyphonies of William Machaut, meets the scholarly song of Taghi Akhbari, improvising on texts of Persian poets Khayyam and Rumi.

Ghazal is the name of a style of courtly poetry, often sung, flourishing in Persia in the Middle Ages. Tinged with spirituality, its metaphorical sense connects real love to mystical love. In the medieval tradition, the End Amor, Courteous Love, speak mostly of a forbidden love, a “love from afar”. Love by far * is the title of a 12th century song. According to the legend, the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, its author, conceived an impossible love for a princess of the East and lived suffering, the heart exiled. Breath, melisma, arabesque sounds, ornaments and modalities are found in both traditions. So they can answer each other, join together without ever getting confused.

Ten centuries later, a contemporary composer, Zad Moultaka, from Lebanon, is again in the near and far dialect, but time has replaced space and this distance is a nostalgia and an impossible embrace, in the lost worlds of love sighs. Accelerated slowed, stretched, shrunken, he approaches the melism and ornament, in a powerful vocal tradition as a structural form of the work in order to create a place adrift, the intertwining and the intoxication of the vocal material.

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