The story of this album begins back in 2015 with a young Syrian musician playing in the streets of Istanbul just to scrape by. Denied access to Europe, Moutaz Abass sat on a small stool and casually played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy without attracting much attention from the passers by – a tune we all know too well and the meaning of which we often forget. The irony of this was startling – a war refugee, abandoned to his own devices, stringing along a melody on his oud that symbolises the humanitarian values we cherish so much: brotherhood, equality and acceptance of all.
Egīls Šēfers
The rich variety of music on this album is unified by each composer’s ‘dream of freedom’. All of these composers experienced exile of one kind or another, travelling far from home in order to pursue their vocation. Mozart left the stifling confines of Salzburg for the cultural riches of Vienna. Stravinsky, Hindemith, Zemlinsky and Pärt all left unsympathetic or even hostile regimes, and Kurdish composer Moutaz Arian escaped Syria and now lives in China; he dedicated his piece, Borderless, to Carion. Yet despite the profound, sometimes painful origins of this music, this is an album full of joie de vivre: music full of hope, intellect and even humour.
Mozart’s delightful Serenade No.11 in E flat, KV 375, was his first known foray into the Viennese tradition of wind band music, and Stravinsky’s Suite No. 2, derived from earlier piano pieces, features a March, Waltz and Polka which are all wonderfully skewed takes on convention, while Stravinsky’s unmistakeable harmony, reminiscent of Petrushka, imbues the quirky Galop.
Moutaz Arian is a Kurdish composer from northern Syria who now lives in Beijing, performing his compositions in China and Japan. Arian’s Borderless is a powerfully pertinent and hugely topical work. He says of this piece that it expresses “our desire to live more freely in a world without the borders that separate us, not only borders of land, but physical and human barriers, too.”
