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MAGDI ABOUL-KHEIR – ROOTS IN MY HEART
Magdi Aboul-Kheir’s Roots in My Heart is a ten piece chamber music collection all about intimacy, emotional content and the enduring power of melody. Strings, woodwinds and piano are all in the mix, creating a very warm and welcoming atmosphere with plenty of lovely harmonic textures and expressive lines. It’s an album that is all about the balance between the intimate and the more expansive, with each piece getting its own emotional space to breathe in whilst still maintaining the overall character of the collection.
Roots in My Heart is an album that examines dreams, meetings with the natural world, partings, the sheer joy of life and above all else love. It’s an album that has a real emotional breadth and is capable of moving from one emotional state to another. Some of the pieces are quite light and fun, others are more passionate and reflective. There’s euphoria and melancholy, tenderness and intimacy all in the mix and it’s a very personal album without ever quite becoming the sort of thing that would be emotionally debilitating.
Strings, woodwinds and piano are still the core of the album’s expressive character and it’s this combination that creates the album’s warm harmonies and the memorable melodies. It’s not complexity that’s the attraction really, it’s the melodic quality of the pieces and the emotions they convey. There’s a real sense of romance throughout the collection which gives the ten tracks a sense of unity and allows each one to have its own contribution to the overall emotional arc of the album.
Roots in My Heart achieves the trick of creating a very genuine chamber music experience that is both accessible and deeply felt. There’s a real sense of progression as it moves from the playful through to the passionate and into the reflective. It’s not just a collection of pieces, it’s an experience which invites you to rediscover the very human emotions through melody, through warmth and through the sheer intimacy of the music. Aboul-Kheir has produced a record which makes its mark through the sincerity of the harmonies and the sheer character of the melodies.
