ORIENT – OCCIDENT
1200 – 1700

Ref: AVSA9848

• Hespèrion XXI
• Jordi Savall

Listening to this selection of music from East and West so ingeniously put together by Jordi Savall is no ordinary experience. In addition to the aesthetic emotion, we feel another that is even more intense – a sense of magical communion with reconciled humanity.

One can’t help feeling that, with the simultaneous demise of both Sepharad and Al-Andalus in the second half of the 15th century, only forty years after the fall of Byzantium, some part of the human soul was also lost. Those events led to the destruction of intellectual and spiritual bridges between East and West that have never since been repaired. Once the fertile hub of our cultural universe, the Mediterranean became a battlefield and a barrier between peoples.

+ information in the CD booklet

AMIN MAALOUF
Translated by Jacqueline Minett