COMPOSERS: Marc Sinan
LABELS: ECM
WORKS: Fasil
PERFORMER: Marc Sinan (guitar), other musicians
CATALOGUE NO: 1773154
You could never accuse ECM of a lack of style and in this respect marc sinan’s Fasil is well up to standard.
This Turkish-Armenian-German guitarist wanted to create a bridge from Western classical music – in which he was trained – to the music of Islam.
He has devised a rumination on the story of the last wife of the Prophet Mohammed, and has spent time absorbing the rules of a Turkish imam’s makam improvisations.
The sound-world he creates with piano, viola, bass, and percussion is dreamily beautiful, but the Serbian singer-actor, Yelena Kuljic, presents an unvarying tone of plangent portentousness. Michael Church