COMPOSERS: Various
LABELS: Opus 111
PERFORMER: Sirine Ensemble/Andrei Kotov
CATALOGUE NO: OPS 30-267
The SIRINE ENSEMBLE aims to bring together a repertoire of polyphony, monastery styles and popular religious traditions. Really, it’s more ‘early’, in a speculative kind of way, than ‘world’.
Still, the sounds in Putnik run from Bulgarian-type choral via Orthodox chant to hurdy-gurdy and psaltery music and a Pärt-like new composition. They centre on an attempt to reconstruct the way poems were sung by religious vagrants, like Carmina burana without the booze.
Period purity isn’t laboured, and the outcome is a coherent bag of surprises, energetically done and imaginatively chosen.