This joyful celebration of Iranian music would be banned in Iran

MUSIC
Iranian Music Festival
Leichhardt Town Hall, March 6 – 8
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★

A festival that starts with a minute’s silence is a first for this reviewer. Yet, the silence – and the joyful noise that followed it – could hardly be more timely.

Explicit mention of politics is kept rightly offstage during the performances but it doesn’t take a PhD in Persian history to work out which way this collection of dreamers and poets leans: the fact this very festival – with its mixed gender bands and not a veil in sight – would be banned for indecency in Iran speaks volumes.

That is not to say there is any hint of celebration of the unfolding war. Every performance reflected in its own style on the suffering across the Middle East. For Sama Ensemble, this meant rearranging a world fusion set instead to focus on ancient Persian melodies. It was a fitting aesthetic choice, for there can be few traditions with more doleful than Persian classical music.

And whether singer Farhad Bozorgzadeh was mourning the ashes of Persepolis or the young innocents mown down by their own government in January, his voice carried that same dignity in the midst of loss.

Sandy Evans’ Magic Music took a different tack. A set inexplicably heavy with Christmas themes and Satsuki Odamura’s Japanese instrumentation may seem an odd choice, yet the jauntiness it brought reflected the mixed feelings to which the diaspora is currently subject – summed up by her ensemble’s master percussionist Sohrab Kolahdooz as “happy and sad, but mainly happy… at this fragile moment”. The ensemble’s multicultural fusion – rounded off and grounded by Steve Elphick on double bass – seemed appropriate for a country where east and west have mingled for so long.

That mingling occurs within Iran’s diverse peoples as well, and so it was fitting that festival closer Pouya Abdi focused on Azeri music, hailing from Iran’s north-western reaches. Rearranged and modernised for his jazz quartet, the result was skilful and genuinely haunting.

For a country and a people that long for change, this thoughtful festival was a reminder that while Iranian regimes may come and go, its art – steeped in centuries of longing – knows how to wait.

MUSIC
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
March 7
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★
The last time the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performed Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music III, part of a series that changed the way the world thought about Australian music, was in 1996. The conductor then – and now – was Simone Young. In 1996 she was making her debut with the orchestra. Three decades later, she is Chief Conductor.

Thirty years of perspective has transformed Sun Music III from startling newness to the pinpoint portrayal of a moment in time. The evocation of a gamelan orchestra feels quaint, momentarily, but the expanded palette of orchestral colours, not just in the percussion but, across the strings and brass, is brilliantly rendered, then and now.

Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma makes a triumphant return to Sydney performing Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto. Written in New York in 1938, as the composer watched the build-up to war in Europe, the work is shot through with restless anxiety. Lamsma overlays the sense of dread with a fearless, icy beauty of sound, cutting through the orchestral texture with radiant harmonics.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6 bursts onto the stage with a cataclysmic roar, the kind of orchestral tutti you feel in your bones. The shrill of the piccolo, underlaid by spiralling virtuosity across the strings, sets in motion a gripping demonstration of the power of music, live and loud.

Beautiful solos, including from cellist Simon Cobcroft and from bass clarinettist Alexander Morris emerge from the welter of sound, as does the gentle surprise of Alice Morgan’s saxophone. But it is the sustained hush of the final movement that reveals the full range and delicacy of this fine band.

As Chief Conductor, Young’s work with the orchestra naturally focuses on her internationally recognised expertise in the repertoire of Mahler and Wagner. But it is good to be reminded that specialisation does not mean limitation: as the orchestra explores tough repertoire from less-travelled roads Young radiates an assured omniscience – a galvanising ‘I’ve got this’ – that gives the orchestra an unfettered confidence to play fearlessly.