Don't you just love the bombast and bluster of a big orchestra? Richard Strauss wrote for the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, and Stravinsky conducted it. So it knows how to make a racket when called upon to do so. Here, of course – in a programme of music performed with Tunisian oud-master Abouar Brahem, produced by Manfred Eicher and released by ECM – the emphasis is on what it can do quietly. “For me,” says Brahem, who composed the epic, two-disc set in the wake of the popular uprisings that spread recently across North Africa and the Middle East beginning in his native Tunisia, “it's most exciting to improvise against the strings when they are very piano – the detail in the sound and texture, the delicacy and the chamber music quality of it, can be very touching.” What you get is a feast of cinematically atmospheric, deeply felt musical reflection – sinuous waves of strings and Brahem's unresolved, tugging oud lines playing off one another to dynamic effect on the title track, which translates as ‘Remembrance’.