Songs of Love & Exile: a Sephardic Journey

The debut album of an exciting young Dutch soprano: an anthology of popular Sephardic songs completed with excerpts from a rare song collection by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Sepharad, today's Spain and Portugal, held a large Jewish population since at least the 8th century. During the Moorish occupation the

Sephardic Jews enjoyed a degree of religious freedom unheard of in Europe at the time, taking part in the rich social and intellectual life of the day.

The musical tradition was passed on by the women, who were kept at home among themselves. The music was the result of the cultural melting pot of the day, a mix of the epic tales sung by medieval Spanish bards, Jewish liturgical melodies and Arabic styles of melodic ornamentation. The language was Judaeo-Spanish, a mix of Spanish and Hebrew.

On this new recording the traditional songs come in arrangements by contemporary composers as well as by the artists themselves. o Both artists, soprano Channa Malkin and guitarist Izhar Elias, share a Jewish ancestry, deeply rooted in the widely spread Jewish settlements of Central Europe and the Middle East.