Together with its artistic director Julian Azkoul, the United Strings of Europe develop engaging programmes with the aims of finding threads between different works and epochs, musical cultures and backgrounds, of blending the familiar with the new and of encouraging people to listen to works in different ways and discover new repertoire.

For its new release entitled Hommages, the ensemble celebrates musical traditions, from the myth of Apollo and the muses of Greek Antiquity to legends of the 20th century, Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla, renewed by contemporary voices. Inspired by dreams and recollections of the past, this imaginative programme features recent works alongside the world-première recording of Julian Azkoul’s arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical ballet Apollon musagète, composed during the 1920s. While Dobrinka Tabakova’s Organum Light, here recorded for the first time, was inspired by Einstein’s theory of quantum light, Osvaldo Golijov has returned to his Argentinian roots for Last Round, a tribute to two legendary compatriots. As for Olli Mustonen (who can be heard as a pianist on several other BIS recordings), his Second Nonet is a timeless work in which we hear echoes of the Balkans, music from the Romantic period and Nordic moods. A further work by Mustonen, Apotheosis, another world-première recording, concludes this varied programme on a dramatic note, inspired by Bach’s chorale preludes.