Music from Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Armenia

Isabelle Courroy has booked a truly dazzling line-up for the second part of her Confluences trilogy. Le chant des sources (The Song of the Springs) gives a central place to the voice, here magnificently incarnated by Françoise Atlan, Katerina Papadopoulou, Mariyana Pavlova, Maria Simoglu and Gülay Haçer Toruk.

The ten melodies on this album, which can be listened to as a single song, are drawn from traditional repertoires from Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Whether instrumental or vocal, are all gems which Isabelle Courroy has polished to perfection, and for which she has composed a new setting.

These arrangements give an important place to string instruments: santur, pontic lyre, nyckelharpa, violin, tenor violin, viola da gamba, kanun, harp, tamboura, laouto, oud, mandola, and double bass. Percussion instruments - dafs, bendir, derbouka and tapan - join them to offer a sound palette of great richness. At the heart of this framework, Isabelle Courroy's kaval flutes breathe their expressive power and organic character through all the pieces.

"I discovered the kaval flute over thirty years ago. I immersed myself in learning this instrument whose oblique form, the most rudimentary possible, could be summed up as a hollow rod pierced with holes, which is blown into from the side. The apparent simplicity of this starting point gives birth to a fluid and complex sound, an end result that is the fruit of the musician's work and my daily delight. I like the emptiness of the mouthpiece which, through the visceral necessity of the breath, brings the centre of the player's being directly into contact with the centre of the listener's being.'

Isabelle Courroy