Marc Sinan, Dresdner Sinfoniker, Traditional musicians from Turkey and Armenia

Hasretim, Turkish for "my yearning", is the record of a journey and of the work that grew out of it. In 2010 the guitarist and composer Marc Sinan travelled through Anatolia, from the Black Sea coast where his grandparents lived to the Armenian border, filming traditional musicians whose craft is disappearing. He then wrote a piece for mixed ensemble around their voices and instruments. This two-disc set on ECM holds a live concert on CD, and on DVD the filmed premiere with the field recordings themselves.

Idea and production belong to Sinan and Markus Rindt, director of the Dresdner Sinfoniker, who travelled and filmed with him between January and April 2010. Andrea Molino orchestrated and arranged the music, and the orchestra co-produced the project with Hellerau, the arts centre in Dresden. The premiere at the Festspielhaus Hellerau on 9 October 2010, with Molino conducting, is the performance seen on the DVD. The CD was recorded live at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in July 2011 under Jonathan Stockhammer, with Turkish and Armenian guests such as Araik Bartikian on duduk and zurna. Its opening Prolog was recorded later, in December 2012 at MIAM in Istanbul.

The concert is laid out in five tableaux named after stops on the route (Ordu, the yayla highlands, Trabzon, Erzurum and Kars), framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Western strings, winds, brass and prepared piano meet oud, kemençe, kaval, bağlama, duduk and darbuka, and the filmed village musicians appear on screens and in the sound. The Erzurum tableau holds In Memory of Vahide, a ten-minute piece for two duduks, while the Epilog brings back singers and players from the journey, among them Asiye Göl and Turan Akdağ. The field recordings on the DVD stand on their own. Ismail Küçük plays kemençe in Trabzon, Aşık Eminoğlu sings to the bağlama in Erzurum, and Seyit Ak on zurna and Ilhan Ak on davul play in a village near Kars.

Premiered as a "musical installation for orchestra and video documents", Hasretim received the Welthorizont special prize of the German UNESCO Commission in 2011. In March 2013 it was staged at the MaerzMusik festival in Berlin. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that "Hasretim conveys above all a native warmth". On the blog ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called it the biggest leap in Sinan's career as a composer. He heard it as more an experience than an experiment.

Released by ECM Records in 2013 as ECM 2330/31, a CD and a DVD in one package. The DVD adds a photo gallery from April 2010 and background texts by Sinan and the musicologist Martin Greve in German, English and Turkish.