Whatever happens with the proposed BA strike, you can still get away at Christmas. All it takes is a track or two from Jordi Savall’s newest exploration of ancient music from the lands where the Orient and Occident meet. No King’s College Chapel carols, no congregational hymns: Istanbul offers art music from the 17th-century Ottoman court, streaked through with improvisations and the traditional music of Armenia or the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula.
Whatever the tradition, Western scales are a universe away. We manoeuvre instead through the micro-intervals of the Turkish makams and other modal equivalents. Rhythms have their own peculiarities: if you try counting beats in some of these pieces, you’ll run short of fingers.
The music presented is instrumental, though so