Placeless - Kronos Quartet, Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat

I am more than excited to let you that the most recent album by grammy-winning Kronos Quartet includes 14 songs and is a collaboration between Kronos Quartet and Iranian prominent vocalists and sisters, Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat. Six out of fourteen songs are arrangementby me through the process of Kronos Festival

2017 and 2018 at San Francisco SFJAZZ. The othersarrangements are by my friends, Atabak Elyasi, Aftab Darvishi and Jacob Garchik. The album is published by Norwegian record label Kirkelig Kulturverksted (KKV), in association with New York-based Valley Entertainment and is available now both in CD and digital format: https://song.link/album/us/i/1453184194​

Review: ZOFOMOMA, Melbourne Recital Centre

With 20 fingers, 15 composers, and 15 artworks, ZOFOMOMA is a creative and jubilant spectacle.

Pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi. Image: Musica Viva.

It is fun to watch Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi play the piano. The duo, based in San Francisco, share the one instrument on an otherwise empty stage. They call themselves ‘ZOFO’, a ‘twenty-finger orchestra’, and move together with fluid precision and exceptional co-ordination. Both are charismatic performers who deploy flourishes of foot stomping and vocalisation in crescendos of tension, occasionally manipulating the internal strings of the piano to various effect. It’s a creative and jubilant spectacle to behold.

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San Francisco’s Amaranth Quartet offers world premieres in its D.C. debut

Four women formed the Amaranth Quartet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2014, and the group made its Washington debut Wednesday night, closing out the season of free concerts at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The results were mixed, with two intriguing world premieres bookended by less assured performances of older music.

Sahba Aminikia, an Iranian-born composer, is also based in San Francisco. His one-movement quartet “Rhyme by Rhyme” sets a poem of that name by Tahirih, the pen name of Fatimih Baraghani, a leader of the nascent Babi religion who was executed in Iran in the 19th century. Most of the piece is a sort of chaconne, in eight-measure segments over an octave ostinato that begins in the cello. Percussive strikes on the bodies of the instruments and pizzicato motifs recalled traditional Persian music. The four musicians read the phrases of the poem, translated into English, in rhythmic repetitions that achieved a hypnotic effect.

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