We’re setting hearts on fire with Shawati, a new version of the highly successful Rivages (shawati in Arabic) project we presented in October 2017 at ARCOOP. Folk and oral music is alive. It transforms, it works, it adapts. This concert offers a unique opportunity for three entities to meet: the duo Bedouin Burger - Lynn Adib (Syria/France) and Zeid Hamdan (Lebanon/France) play and sing Middle Eastern folk songs, in updated, sometimes transformed versions. They also interpret to original songs of their own composition. The Ensemble Dīwān, forty musicians, directed by Francis Biggi, plays a repertoire of folk music from around the Mediterranean and the Balkans.

The program consists mainly of compositions from oral traditions. An ensemble of students from the HEM - Haute école de musique de Genève, plays Folk Songs by Italian composer Luciano Berio: a plunge into traditional melodies, in a contemporary rewriting.