Elina Duni

Partir is the first solo album by the singer Elina Duni, twelve songs of love, loss and leaving sung in nine languages. Born in Tirana and raised in Switzerland, Duni had made two ECM records of Albanian songs with her quartet. Here she steps away from that repertoire and from the band, accompanying herself on piano, guitar and frame drum. The theme that holds the material together is departure, forced or chosen, and the uncertain hope that comes after it.

The programme grew out of readings Duni has given since 2008 with her mother, the novelist and poet Besa Myftiu, in which she sang between the texts with guitar and percussion. In her later solo concerts she linked the songs with texts of her own, written in French, about exile in her life and about the refugee crisis. She has compared working alone after years in a group to withdrawing into a monastery. The album was recorded in July 2017 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The booklet opens with words by Tahar Ben Jelloun.

The sources range widely. There are traditional songs from Albania, Kosovo, Armenia, Macedonia and Switzerland, and an Arabic song from the Andalusian tradition. Beside them stand Jacques Brel's Je Ne Sais Pas, Domenico Modugno's Amara Terra Mia and Alain Oulman's fado Meu Amor. Duni's own Let Us Dive In is the one song in English. The accompaniments are kept to a minimum. Amara Terra Mia opens the record over sparse guitar, while Lamma Bada Yatathanna is carried only by the daf, the Middle Eastern frame drum. The Brel song, sung over spare piano chords, is the emotional peak of the set, and the Swiss Schönster Abestärn closes it on a lighter note.

Writing in Songlines, Kim Burton found the mood "one of quiet and reflective regret" and heard Duni's piano chords complement "the rawness of her voice". For John Kelman of All About Jazz, Eicher's sequencing gives the album its own narrative and makes it "a complete, self-contained and thoroughly compelling experience". Several German-language critics stressed how unified the record sounds despite its many languages and sources, from Swiss German to Yiddish, Portuguese and Armenian.

This is the CD edition of ECM 2587, released in April 2018.