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ments onstage may reference specific celebrations or rituals, but were they still folklore or now fakelore? It’s theatre, some of it kitschy, remnants of rustic Commie camp shorn of overt agitprop. But if you just relax and enjoy the show, you can’t resist feeling that the Albanians do grand scale ‘folkloric’ productions as well as any- one, anywhere, perhaps at any time. They do it still, and they do it con brio, a matter of national pride. Hoxha was right when he declared: “The religion of Albania is Albanianism.”

“The first prize was awarded to Tirana region for best preserv- ing and presenting the traditional songs, dances, rituals and folk cos- tumes,” the Ministry of Culture’s Zhulieta Harasani kindly informed me after the festival. (I’d been at the awards cere mony but hadn’t understood it.) I’d make a poor festival judge: Looking over my notes I found two words on the group from Tirana: “Slick production”. I’d taken more favourable note of other groups: “Astounding women’s iso group from Berat,” I enthusiastically scrawled. “Same intervals as lining out [hymn song].” A group playing shepherd’s flutes from the same region sounded like free jazz to me: “Ornette Coleman,” I noted. I got a few individual names down: I liked the “barrel-chested belter from Korça Endri Fifo,” and, from the same region Lindita Xhoko, who was leading a female polyphonic group on Tuesday night when the power blew out. (The outage was brief but dramat- ic.) On Monday night I’d been stirred by a male iso-polyphonic group: “Iso group from Fier has the X factor,” I noted, “stunning with all the power the iso-polyphony form has. Fier singers tops.”

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ome of the week’s most memorable moments happened offstage. On the opening night everyone huddled under ancient stone archways as sheets of rain fell and thun- der rumbled overhead. As we waited out the storm, one of the iso-polyphonic groups burst into drone-laden song, asserting that the festival was on, even if offstage. (The rain then relented.) Later in the week members of Grupi Argjiro sat for hours at an outdoors café singing stunning iso-polyphonic songs, showing in a relaxed way that theirs is a community of music. (Like the town of Gjirokastër, UNESCO has honoured Alba- nian iso-polyphony, designating it as an Intangible Cultural Her- itage of Humanity.)

The festival also served up some fare more fun than folkloric, notably the beefy Balkan brass attack of Fanfara Tirana, seasoned groove masters who got everyone up and dancing. Less muscular but no less infec tious was the music of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s band Divanhana, and vocalist Rona Nishliu brought a Balkan jazz blend to the closing night.

Staging a festival of this scope even twice a decade is a Her- culean undertaking. Can Albania pull it off again in 2020? Let’s hope. Its music draws from deep wells; the people there still treasure it. Outsiders like me may grasp it dimly, but it’s impossible not to sense its elemental power. Albanian music has plenty of earth and sky in it. Whatever the festival’s future, its past can be readily explored online, including a charming 1978 film with limited plot (a former partisan grandpa is discovered to be a fine polyphonic singer) and lots of musical performance. Pranverë Në Gjiirokastër (Spring In Gjirokastër) aired daily on local TV during the week of the festival.

argjirofest.info/en/ Wool gathering as theatre… F