De Jérusalem à Cordoue, Théâtre de L’Île Saint-Louis Paul Rey, Paris

Hidden away in the courtyard of a Seine-side mansion on the Quai d’Anjou, this small hall swagged in red velvet would be the perfect setting for a seance. And indeed this evening of hidden connections begins in mystery: a Tibetan singing bowl struck, then the sound of a woman singing an ancient Greek invocation to the Muse.

“Do you remember the time,” asks a man in American-accented French, “before the whole Mediterranean world came under the sway of the three eastern religions...? There were women and drums in the temples then.” The woman beats a huge bendier, a frame drum that hangs in the spotlight like a Méliès moon, and sings a prayer by Akiba ben Yosef from the second century BC to a later Sephardic melody.

The two performers are Catherine Braslavsky, an early music specialist with a sideline in Indian music, and Joseph Rowe, a multi-instrumentalist. Their concert juxtaposes music from the three “eastern religions”: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. “Quant Voi La Flor Novele”, a 13th-century troubadour song ostensibly devoted to the Virgin Mary, with Braslavsky accompanying herself on a plucked dulcimer, flows into “Mwashah: Lama Bada Yatathanna”, a roughly contemporary Arab-Andalucian song. Rowe plucks careful, delicate oud. But despite the title, the set does not stick rigidly to the era of convivencia: there are Coptic texts from the gospel of Thomas, Gregorian chant, Cathar prayer (which Rowe tendentiously links to the tolerance of the Andalusians). A Syrian Christian chant twists in quarter tones around a struck bell.

The settings are not musicologically exact. When Braslavsky sings a couple of anthems by Hildegard of Bingen, “Spiritui Sancto” and “Ave Generosa”, Rowe chimes the Tibetan bowls like a funereal peal of bells or plays the tambour, its strings sliding and shifting, wrapping around each other. “In Te Sum”, music and Latin lyrics by Braslavsky herself, is punctuated by Rowe’s mbira, its spiky rhythms occasionally slipping like the gears of ancient clockwork.

The concert finishes with “Al Andalusi”, a text by the 13th-century Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi. Braslavsky sings a sinuous melody over guttural vocal drone from Rowe, with a pulse of bendier. And then, amid another mirage of tambour, she sings the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic: “the native language”, says Rowe, “of its author, Yeshua ben Miriam.” Finally, the trance breaks, and for the first time the audience dares to applaud. (

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