I recently had a chance to chat with world-renowned mandolinist Avi Avital about his 2025 album, "Song of the Birds." Avi is an absolute delight, and his passion for this project with his group Between Worlds is on full display.
But before getting into our conversation, I have to ask: what is it about the mandolin?
Smaller than a guitar, softer than a banjo, it has a flat, pear-shaped body about the size of a dinner plate. Each of its four strings doubled so it can fill a room with sound, but remain intimate, inviting you to lean in to hear every nuance.
One of the masters of this instrument is Avi Avital. Born in Israel, educated in Italy, he’s recorded the cornerstones of mandolin repertoire by Vivaldi, stretched beyond that with Bach and Mozart, and commissioned over one hundred works from composers of our time to write new music for the instrument.
Beyond all of this, Avi continues to explore sounds both new and old with his hand-picked group Between Worlds. It all started about two years ago, with a concert series exploring the dialogue between classical and folk music, leading to a 2025 release called "Song of the Birds."
When I talked with Avi, he told me about this musical journey and why he focused on three regions in particular: Southern Italy, Iberia, and the Black Sea.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity)
Avi Avital: Each one of these regions that I chose for this triptych had a reason of its own. So Italy, because I lived there and that's where I discovered the richness and the nuances of so many regional subcultures. The cultures, I mean, just the diversity, which is amazing and rich and wonderful to discover.
Iberia came in mind because it has the, you know, the most examples of music that was composed for the concert hall, inspired by folklore. We’re talking about the first half of the 20th century with composers like Manuel de Falla, also on the album, Granados as well, Albeniz, Rodrigo. There's just so many examples, it lends itself to take it and rearrange it again to make it sound more Spanish - replacing the mezzo-soprano with a flamenco singer in the case of de Falla's music. And it really lends itself to the project and to the idea that I had for the project.
And the Black Sea is, again, is an incredible example of how much different, diverse musical cultures lay around the circle of the Black Sea. At the same time, you can kind of really follow on the map with your hand and see how the melodies influence each other, the music mutates a little bit along the seashore, and you kind of feel that there are no borders in the music. It just evolves in a most wonderful, organic way. It's wonderful to experience this.
Katie Ladrigan: There was a quote I found, you said that, “Feeling at home in places that seem foreign, even discovering parts of yourself in them is a deeply moving idea,” and that's the idea behind the whole project. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Avi Avital: You know, one of the most formative moments I had with this ensemble was then the first project we ever did was with Marina Heredia, an incredible flamenco singer.
We, the ensemble, we are ten supreme chamber musicians - I handpicked each one of them; they come from all over the world. Each one of them, of course, classically trained, but also bring their own heritage; people that can improvise, that can bring their own folk music from wherever they come: Greece, United States, Italy, France, and so on. And we can all, being classical musicians, it's sort of a universal music. You don't have to be German to play Brahms, right? Hopefully. You don't have to be Italian to play Vivaldi. That's not how it works. So we live in this universal mindset where we do, as classical musicians, catch the nuances, the rhetorics, the accent of each one of these compositions, of these musical languages, especially when we come to play music that is composed, inspired by folklore. When we play de Falla, we want to catch this ornamentation that makes it sound Spanish. When we hear Spanish music, we know it's flamenco. I ask myself as a professional musician, “Why? What is it in the music that I recognize it as flamenco? What is the accent, the ornamentation, the trill, the accent that makes it sound flamenco?”
So, the encounter with Marina Heredia, who's really a master of her art, was formative for me because that's what she does. Four generations, for ten generations, there are… her father is like a famous, was a famous flamenco singer, her grandmother, too. Her son is now learning the craft. So, it was very fascinating to me, all my life being, you know, catching nuances and playing all kinds of music, to meet someone who's only doing that. But really, there's no, like, one stone on, in her path that remained in its place. It's really the profound of the craft of the art that she presents was - is admirable. And I'm also happy with my versatility, and the fact that I can, you know, imitate so many different genres and play - I mean, I don't want to downgrade what I'm doing, but it was just a very interesting encounter of two types of musician, of musicianship, which was… well. It was beautiful. And obviously, she taught us a lot. She taught us how to play de Falla, practically.
[MUSIC]
Katie Ladrigan: The arrangements in general, were those more of a, you talk to an arranger, they present you with the final product, or was there more of an organic, improvisational nature to putting those together?
Avi Avital: Both. I wanted to give carte blanche to the composers. Practically, it was the same task like, you know, Bartók and de Falla and all these composers did a hundred years ago. And I wanted it to see if we can recreate this amazing artistic practice into our days.
I mean, you have to think that it's very different, the same kind of action to put folklore, a traditional melody, and to re-harmonize it, to restructure it, to represent it as abstract art music has to be different than how composers did it a hundred years ago, simply because to catch a melody from the Carpathian mountains Bartók had to hike two days with a huge recording device on a donkey, and we go on YouTube and we can listen to any Carpathian folk music within two seconds.
So, of course, this collective knowledge, awareness of many, many different cultures and musical traditions is something to factor in. People who sit in the audience and listen to these arrangements or on the radio, they know more about flamenco and what sounds Spanish and what sounds Balkan more than people a hundred years ago, and so, this is wonderful. But I wanted to see how composers in our days would translate the same sort of action.
Katie Ladrigan: As you've moved from the process of putting the project together and then into a recording studio, and now you're on tour with the group, what has that been like, experiencing the music live with people in all sorts of different spaces?
Avi Avital: It's been amazing! I have to say that the response of the audience is always great. It's always a little bit surprising - although, this is exactly what we planned: to surprise the audience. They come to the concert hall - I mean, some of them maybe know my music and I always, throughout many programs in the past, always had this little bit of a fingerprint of integrating something that is quote-unquote “foreign” to the concert hall. Just the sheer fact that I’m coming on stage with a mandolin is already, brings that, you know, “built-in.” But, you know, sitting in a concert hall and suddenly hearing the south Italian singer Alessia Tondo, with sounds - she's a singer, but it’s sounds that I've never heard before in a concert hall and all these, you know, interesting intonations, and almost quarter tones.
[MUSIC]
Of course the flamenco singer, the choir from Georgia, that was a discovery for all the people that came to the concert.
[MUSIC]
So yeah, we work a lot on the surprise factor - and not “surprise” as, you know, as… in the clownish aspect of it, but just the contrast between folkloric traditions and very composed, refined, finessed classical interpretation. This contrast between these two approaches of music is the driving force, I think, in the listening experience, which is also translated in the album. But it's very much lived in the live situation.
Katie Ladrigan: I love that! Speaking of surprises, I understand that a certain bird made for some laughter in the concert hall. Could you talk about that?
Avi Avital: [laughs] Yes, oh my god! So, the album is called Song of the Birds; this is the name of the last track on the album, also the last piece that we play in our concerts. It's very symbolic for the ensemble because “Song of The Birds,” we know it, we concert-goers know it because of Pablo Casals, the classical cellist, but it's a Catalan folk song. It's a Christmas carol from Catalonia, that he made a point, ending each one of his concerts with this song when... from the moment he had to live in exile, away from his homeland under the Franco regime.
[MUSIC]
It's this one incredible melody. Again, we're talking about eight bars of a melody. So strong and so charged with emotions and now, Pablo Casals even charged it even more with content about cultural identity, political identity, national identity, all these questions that we ask ourselves a lot these days as artists and as citizens. And so it was clear for me that this has to be in the album because it symbolizes a lot of this project.
[MUSIC]
The task was given to David Bruce to create an arrangement, so it's no longer a Christmas song, but it's charged with this nostalgia that Pablo Casals put into it, and it starts very nostalgic. But it's also a natural, kind of, it's a very… in its origins, it's a very naturalistic song, because it talks, it's the birds, the different kinds of birds telling the children about their perspective of the nativity scene. In the arrangement, David Bruce takes it from nostalgia to something very kind of industrial, urban in the second verse, but it ends only with sounds of birds. Nature wins; the birds win.
[MUSIC]
We produce these sounds ourselves from all kinds of whistles and musical instruments that imitate sounds of birds. I bought a big box of twenty different birds that a lovely couple in middle-of-nowhere France, in the countryside, they craft them themselves. And so, we distributed them in the ensemble, and the first concert - this is a very tense moment in the concert - imagine: we end a two-hours [long] concert only with sounds of birds, so all the audience, you feel they're sitting in the edge of the chair, and you hear only these bird sounds, and everyone closing their eyes. It's a beautiful, delicate moment… And one of the birds [laughs] was a cuckoo. It had this, “cuckoo, cuckoo” sound, and very low and very much louder than all the other bird whistles that we had, and just everyone started to laugh because it had a very comic sound on a very tense kind of moment. So, that's the bird we decided to retire, and it stays in the box! [laughs]
Katie Ladrigan: A universal sound to go with some universal music.
[MUSIC]
Thanks, Avi!
Avi Avital: Thank you very much. Take care!
[MUSIC]
