Tous des oiseaux gathers music by Eleni Karaindrou for two recent projects. One is the play of that name by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, the other Bomb, A Love Story, a film by Iranian actor and director Payman Maadi. The film score is her first new work for cinema since the death of Theo Angelopoulos, her long-time collaborator. Both scores combine a string orchestra with Greek and Middle Eastern instruments and a small group of soloists who have worked with her for years.
Mouawad's play, an epic set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, premiered at the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris in November 2017. It follows a romance between a German Jew and an American of Arab descent and is performed in four languages. The recordings were made in October 2017 and January 2018 at Sierra Studios in Athens. Singer Savina Yannatou, lyra and lute player Sokratis Sinopoulos, cellist Alexandros Botinis and Karaindrou herself at the piano lead the ensemble, with the strings under concertmaster Argyro Seira. Manfred Eicher produced, and edited and mixed the material with engineer Giorgos Karyotis.
The twelve numbers for the play set Cretan and Constantinople lyras, ney, kanonaki and accordion against flute, harp and strings. Yannatou sings without words on four of them, and alone on Lament, which ECM Reviews identifies as a thirteenth-century Greek song. At the centre stands David's Dream, seven minutes for string orchestra alone, built over drones. A short cello solo, Je ne me consolerai jamais, closes the sequence. The ten cues from Bomb, set in Tehran in 1988, are purely instrumental, with bassoon, oboe and accordion and more of Karaindrou's piano than on her earlier records.
Richard Hanlon of MusicWeb International (2019) called David's Dream "spare, drone-led and effortlessly profound", and counted the play score among her most satisfying. Thom Jurek wrote on AllMusic that, though the album holds two separate works, it is a welcome addition to her catalogue and "an essential one". In the German magazine Audio it was Classical CD of the Month, and Wolfgang Schreiber in the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote of the music's quiet, flowing paths through Mouawad's dark tale.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2634, first released on 30 November 2018, with a 28-page booklet of photographs and texts by the composer.
