Duo Mysterion at Tapadum: Flamenco Guitar, Oud, and a Millennium of Mediterranean Music

November 5 brought a concert that felt like a summation — not of a single tradition but of the entire Mediterranean world that Tapadum has been exploring since its first evening in 2019. Six people came. Thirty-eight more had been thinking about it.

Alberto Capelli on flamenco guitar and Vaggelis Merkouris on oud and voice. A program that crossed twelve centuries and eight countries without leaving the room.

Duo Mysterion: The Project

Mysterion is a stage performance in which music and song meet to tell the story of the cultural multiplicity accumulated in the Mediterranean basin over centuries. The repertoire draws from the classical — and popular — traditions of the Middle East, Byzantine culture, Latin and Arab music: a journey through Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb, and Andalusia.

The instruments are chosen for their representational precision: lute and guitar, the plucked string instruments that connect the Arab-Andalusian world to European folk and classical traditions. The voice recalls ancient poems inspired by the moon and the stars — a repertoire in which the boundary between the sacred and the secular was never as fixed as later history suggested.

The result is a universe of sounds and images — a bridge between the shores of the Mediterranean.

The Repertoire: Sephardic Songs to Maqam

The program traces the common classical material that the great traditions of Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, Arab Andalusia, Morocco, and Spain accumulated through their millennia of mutual contact.

Sephardic songs — carried eastward from Iberia after 1492, preserved in Ladino across the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Pentatonic melodies of Epirus and syrtos from mainland Greece. Čoček rhythms from the Balkans. Arab maqamat — the modal framework that underpins classical music from Morocco to Iran. Samai and mawal — classical forms of the Arab musical tradition.

Each of these bodies of material developed in relative isolation. Yet placed together, they reveal a shared grammar: modal thinking, ornamental improvisation, the centrality of the voice, the treatment of instruments as extensions of breath. The Mediterranean did not create these similarities. It transmitted them — back and forth, over centuries, through trade, conquest, exile, and the simple fact of proximity.

The Historical Foundation

Mysterion’s artistic project is explicit about its historical roots: the musical common ground that Arab, Christian, and Jewish cultures maintained for more than a thousand years. The golden age of that coexistence — the period of Arab presence in Spain and Southern Italy — left a deposit in the musical culture of the entire Mediterranean that has never fully dissolved.

The flamenco guitar carries it. The deep song tradition of Andalusia — cante jondo — is inseparable from the Arab and Sephardic music that surrounded it for centuries. The oud carries it too: the direct ancestor of the European lute, the instrument through which Arab music theory entered medieval European composition.

When Alberto Capelli and Vaggelis Merkouris play together, that history is not being reconstructed. It is being continued.

Alberto Capelli and Vaggelis Merkouris

Vaggelis Merkouris is a long-standing collaborator at Tapadum — a virtuoso of Greek and Mediterranean music who studied oud with the great master Nikos Saragoudas and has performed with Vinicio Capossela, Jamal Ouassini, and many others. He has appeared at Tapadum with the Kara Güneş Quintet on multiple occasions.

Alberto Capelli brings flamenco guitar into a context that reveals the instrument’s deepest roots — not the concert stage of modern flamenco but the Andalusian world from which flamenco emerged, still in direct conversation with the Arabic and Sephardic music that shaped it.

After the Concert: Jam Session

As always, the concert was followed by an open jam session. The breadth of the evening’s repertoire made it a generous framework for improvisation — maqam, modal melody, and Andalusian rhythm are all structures that welcome other instruments without demanding they abandon their own language.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across the Mediterranean and beyond. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.