Steppe Melodies

The Kazakh State String Quartet & friends

Great Steppe Melodies from Kazakh

World Music from the 9th to the 19th century

Hybrid Multichannel SACD compatible CD players

This new release leads to music worlds little known in the West: the steppes of today's Republic of Kazakhstan. If last year's 'sister production' featured exclusively works for string quartet ("Kazakh Classical Music", Divox CDX-21501-6), the present works now comprise a historical period from the 9th to the 19th century and to the present day, with two typical folk instruments, the 'Kobuz' and the 'Dombra' are brought into focus. The Kobuz is a 2-string instrument (strings of horsehair) which, like a viola da gamba, is positioned between the legs for playing; the Dombra, on the other hand, is a 2-string long-necked lute plucked in a similar way as a guitar. To provide an acoustic impression an original arrangement for the same instrument with string quartet is compared with each original composition on this CD.

All musicians come from Kazakhstan and met for the recordings in October 2015 in the Slobodkin Hall in Moscow (Arbatskaya), where a special team recorded the tracks with more than 30 microphones directly for 3-dimensional aurophony (www.auro-3d-com).

The texts in the booklet are in German, English, Kazakh and Russian.