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Debut recordings are often interesting as much for the opportunity they offer listeners to discover a fresh, and hopefully exciting, new musical voice as they are revelatory in terms of which musical styles, artistic decisions, and aesthetic choices a performer will  showcase in their initial recorded effort. In the case of the Montreal-based tenor vocalist Haitham Haidar, the decision was made not to “pick a lane and stick to it,” so to speak, but to creatively fuse his many interests—poetry, spoken word, and resonant, beautiful singing—over an interesting program that brings together the Baroque work of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach with traditional Arabic songs.

This interesting fusion works surprisingly well and continues unabated throughout 2025’s Zaytoun in both instrumental form (the oud master Abdul-Wahab Kayyali is paired here with a top-shelf quartet of Baroque instrumentalists that includes lutenist Sylvain Bergeron, harpsichordist Abraham Ross, violinist Tanya LaPerrière, cellist Amanda Keemaat) and vocally (an aria from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, for example, is gorgeously rendered in Arabic). The title, Zaytoun, is the Arabic word for “olive,” and like the hard-pitted fruit native to Lebanon but now enjoyed around the world, Haidar’s music on this recording is equally pan-global, finding the points of intersection and connection that unite us across cultures, languages, histories, and nations. The whole recording is terrific, but Henry Purcell’s beautiful Music for a While is a standout for its tender rendering and its fusing of possibilities.

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