La porta d'oriente

Album review

It is the military conflicts between the Ottomans and the West that get all the ink in the history books, but peace reigned longer than war did, and there was a good deal of musical interaction between the cultures during peaceful periods. The Turkish influence on Western music, from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, on down, was long the main subject of investigation, but it has become apparent that a good deal of Western music, mostly from Italy via Venice, was played at the Sultan's court as well. At least twice, this music was notated by Europeans in the court's service. The 18th century figure known as Dede the European has been recorded before, but this release by the Montreal early music group Constantinople, which has specialized in this repertory and been at it for some years, investigates someone new: the Ottoman court musician Ali Ufki (ca. 1610-1675), who was born Wojciech Bobowski in Poland and was captured by Tatars in a raid. He described the music of the Turks in detail and notated a good deal of it in combinations represented presently by Constantinople. What makes this fascinating is that the two traditions, although they seem distant from each other today, may have been less so in 1650 when Europeans still learned the modes that had come from the Middle Eastern world, and traders from the eastern Mediterranean heard orchestral music in Venice. Constantinople brings this out, with vigorously rhythmic performances of the Italian pieces. These include popular genres such as the frottola and the tarantella, the latter ably dispatched by tenor Marco Beasley in the anonymous La campana sona! The Turkish pieces are modal improvisations, performed by group founder Kiya Tabassian and kanun player Didem Basar. Overall, the music emerges as unified in a way that is both entertaining and encouraging at a time when the divisions between the Western and Eastern worlds are being stressed, and the arrangement of Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which any listener of the time would have found relevant to the theme, makes an extremely satisfying conclusion. It is indeed encouraging to see musicians beyond the circle of Jordi Savall continuing to explore the meeting places between East and West.
© James Manheim /TiVo