African Patterns and Baroque Ostenati - Concert with Mahoro

Saturday, 11 February 2012 - 17.00h

Mahororo
Tinashe Chidanyika, Mbira dza vazimu
Uwe Grosser, baroque guitar & chitarrone
Hans Huyssen, baroque cello

With works by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, Francesco Geminiani, Gaspar Sanz, Santiago Murcia, as well as traditional Shona and improvised music

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Mahororo is an exploratory musical project of musicians with a special interest in period performance practice of early music from very different cultural realms. Convinced that the unique expressive qualities of early and (so-called) traditional music are far too precious a gift of our ancestors to simply be discarded, yet equally aware of the impossibility to preserve what is bygone, the task at hand is to embark on a quest of engaging with this heritage in a manner which reflects and translates it into renditions which will once again enthral contemporary audiences by bold, vivid and poetic reinterpretations. 

The Shona term ‘Mahororo’ means ‘beautiful place’ and might by analogy roughly correspond to the Western mythological notion of ‘arcadia’. Deliberately juxtaposing fully contrasting styles and idioms, Mahororo constitutes an endeavour at a cultural translation in both directions, an intercultural dialogue, a respective musical acknowledgement, not only allowing and maintaining differences, but fostering and cherishing them as the crucial potential from which the resulting dialogue gains its meaning. Striving for the emergence of a truly shared space of intercultural understanding amounts to nothing less than finding a passport to the utopian province of Mahororo.

The German lutenist Uwe Grosser has been performing and recording in South Africa since 2002. Most notable is his contribution towards the collaboration of the Ensemble Refugium with Dizu Plaatjies and the Dizu Kuduhorn Band, documented on the CD Fynbos Calling. He was also instrumental in facilitating a European tour of the project for which he even built an exact copy of a Ugandan Akadinda xylophone. Experienced in exploring, juxtaposing and combining interlocking rhythms, patterns and textures found in African as well as early European music he joins the Mahororo Project for the first time at this year’s JIMF. Departing from the respective realms of Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque and Shona traditions the outcome of this improvisatory encounter cannot be determined in advance. However, the richly diverse musical material promises for an inspiring journey through unfamiliar landscapes.