Palladium Musicum, Inc., a Greenwich-based non-profit, presents the first of four events of its 2017-2018 season, “An Evening of Traditional Music from Persia,” on Saturday, Nov. 11 from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., at St. Bede’s Chapel, 270 Lake Ave., on the Campus of Carmel Academy.
Two world-renowned virtuoso performers of Iranian music, Shahab Paranj and Sohrab Pournazeri will offer a program of traditional music from Persia, performed on ancient Persian instruments, including the tombak tanbur, and kamancheh. The musical selections will include original compositions of the Pournazeri family interspersed with improvisation. A discussion about Persian music by the performers will be part of the program. The concert has been developed and curated by Robert Sirota, composer.
The evening will conclude with a reception in the chapel. Tickets are $65 general admission and are available at palladiummusicum.org
Of Persian extraction and known for championing Persian music throughout the world, Shahab Paranj (b.1983) is a composer of contemporary classical music based in Los Angeles. His teachers at Tehran University included Karim Qorbani and Majid Esmaeili. While at the San Francisco Conservatory, he studied composition with David Garner, cello with Jennifer Culp, percussion with Jack Van Geem, and piano with Alla Gladysheva. While in New York, Paranj studied with Richard Danielpour. He is currently studying with Ian Krouse and David Lefkowitz at the Univeristy of California, Los Angeles, where he is completing his PhD degree in composition. He has received formal recognition from the Mehr Humanitarian Society (2010) and the City and County of San Francisco (2011).
A cellist and master of the tombak, he has played on more than 40 recordings with musicians all over the world, appearing at more than 100 well-known festivals and venues, such as Lincoln Center in New York, Theater de la Ville in Paris, and Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
He has collaborated with highly respected ensembles such as Shams Ensemble and renowned soloists as Persian master Mohammad Reza Shajarian. Acclaimed by the San Francisco Examiner as “impressive,” and by composer John Adams as “unique,” Paranj blends Persian rhythmic and melodic in uences with Western texture and form.
Sohrab Pournazeri was born in Kermanshah, Iran, on October 7, 1982, to Kurdish parents and had a musical upbringing. His father, Kaykhosro Pournazeri, was a well-known musician who played tanbur and tar and founded the Shams Ensemble in 1980 devoted to the development of modern classical Persian music. At a very young age, Sohrab began studying tanbur and daf, and later tar and setar before nding his true calling by taking up kamancheh which improved his career as Iranian classical musician. Sohrab Purnazeri learned tanbur from his father, Kaykhosro Pournazeri, kamancheh from Ardeshir Kamkar, vocalization from Hamid Reza Noorbakhsh. He began performing before audiences with Shams Ensemble at age fteen.He received his bachelor’s degree in music from the Faculty of the Arts, Sooreh University, Tehran in 2001.
As a soloist and vocalist, Sohrab has collaborated with artists and ensembles wordwide, including Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Shujaat Hussain Khan, and the Paci c Symphony Orchestra. This evening’s concert will include Persian musical compositios by Sohrab as well as his father, Kaykhosro Pournazeri, and his brother, Tahmuores.
A frequent collaborator with Palladium Musicum, Robert Sirota has curated this evening’s concert of traditional Persian music. Over four decades, as a composer he has developed a distinctive voice, clearly discernible in all of his work – whether symphonic, choral, stage, or chamber music. His works have been performed by orchestras across the US and Europe and at festivals including Tanglewood, Aspen, Bowdoin International Music Festival; and Mizzou International Composers Festival.
Recent and upcoming commissions include the American Guild of Organists, the American String Quartet, the Naumburg Foundation, and Concert Artists of Baltimore. A native New Yorker, Sirota studied at Juilliard, Oberlin, and Harvard and divides his time between New York and Searsmont, Maine with his wife, Episcopal priest and organist Victoria Sirota.
