Fran & Flora - Precious Collection

A Closer Listen

Precious Collection is a remarkably diverse LP from cellist Francesca Ter-Berg and violinist Flora Curzon, drawing from Klezmer and Yiddish tradition, folk and modern composition, with a smattering of electronics to sweeten the pot.  One is never sure what one will encounter next, especially as the album begins with high-spirited onomatopoeic singing before plunging into a dark string duet.  Fran & Flora operate as tour guides to a collection of mysterious lands, the intrigue conveyed by Lily Buchanan’s unusual cover art.  This certainly isn’t their native London, or is it?  The album sounds like unexplored woods in which Gypsies and wood sprites dance around multicolored fires, setting off musical sparks whose echoes waft through distant windows, reminding villagers that unfamiliar lands may hide scant miles away.  Simon Roth contributes Ukrainian poik and Ursula Russell drum kit, adding to the disorientation.

The vocals are sparingly used, but when they do appear they make an immediate impact.  Often one singer occupies the foreground and the other the background, although neither lays claim to the land they occupy.  By focusing more often on texture than lyric, the duo extends the intrigue; the tracks sound like tales of lost lands that now exist only in the imagination: amalgamations of tradition and fantasy.  “Fishelekh Gefinin” (“To Catch a Fish”) sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, an integration of elements that delivers some of the album’s most immediate moments. The quickened pace of “Dobriden – Hamunul” is reminiscent of a fever dream.

Can traditional Jewish music ever be considered “punk?”  In the hands of these composers, it can. Their free-spirited approach is characterized by curiosity, energy and verve.  Along with their two guest stars, they discover new fusions like lost tribes. While listening, it’s amazing to discover that only two tracks are wholly original to the duo, the other ten rearrangements of traditional songs. Decades – even centuries – fall away as the duo redefines the definition of a “timeless track.”  The album opens up a world of discovery as listeners may thread back through time in search of the originals, and in so doing discover even more Precious Collections.  (Richard Allen)