EIF: Ibn Battuta: The Traveller of Time
Usher Hall - 17/08/22
In the course of his many adventures, the 14th century traveller known as ibn Battuta would pass through cities such as Cairo or Constantinople, meeting places for other travellers journeying through the known world of that time. The music sourced and arranged by Catalonian musical explorer, Jordi Savall, for this account of ibn Battuta’s many travels is similarly a meeting place for musicians from Vietnam to Spain and all points in between, all of them drawn from the traveller’s many ports of call.
The audience may not have been familiar with the zheng, the santur, the rebab and many of the other realisations of strings, sound-boxes and tubes that were present on the Usher Hall’s stage, but their enthusiastic response to the music they created indicated that that lack of familiarity was no impediment to their enjoyment. For all their widespread origins the instruments shared a quality of sound that conjured up images of shimmering desert vistas, hot dusty roads, lush, tropical forests, and sunlight scintillating on blue seas, the very sights that ibn Battuta would have encountered as he voyaged from the Mekong Delta to Andalucía, and from the steppes to the Malian empire. It is to Savall’ s credit that he was able to marshal those sound qualities into a coherent whole on the ensemble pieces, while also giving the individual instruments the opportunity to shine. Highlights included Madagascan vihela player, Rajery’s ‘Wind Dance’, a raga on sarod by exiled Afghan musician, Daud Khan Sadozai, and a delicate duet, ‘Rain Falling on Foliage’ on pipa (a Chinese cousin of the oud) and the zither-like zheng by Lingling Yu and Minh Trang Nguyen.
The voice was not forgotten either. Katerina Papadopoulou, striking and resplendent in a vermilion robe, sang in an old style all but forgotten in her native Greece, while Syrian singer, Waed Bouhassoun held the Hall spellbound with the Arab lament, ‘Li Saheb’. The contributions of the two Italian classical singers were a little less successful, slightly marred by a problem with the sound balance when they sang over the ensemble.
The one disappointment of the evening was the rather colourless narrative delivered by French actor, Assaad Bouab. Compared to the vibrancy of the music it was somewhat lacking, but allowances have to be made for the fact that Bouab was not speaking in his own language. This, however, did little to mar the brilliance of Jordi Savall’ s concept and its execution. One was left with a feeling of awe at the scale of ibn Battuta’s achievement in those far away times, and a reminder that our differences, as exemplified by those many related instruments, are but inflections of our common humanity.
Cover photo: Ryan Buchanan