A PAINS-TAKING, PAINLESS LOOK AT PERSIAN MUSIC    
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                Week of March 15-22, 2008
                                                                  Vol. 10, No. 79
            OAKLAND---We have a week or month dedicated to almost everything, from 4-H to new cars to fashions to grandparents. Why not an International Month for all our performing arts organizations? Recent performances have prominently featured creativity from Australia, Russia, China, Japan, Argentina, Estonia and (in theater)  South Africa. Focusing  efforts could bring about a richer cornucopia, helped along by the cultural departments of consulates.
            In perhaps the least conventional venture in the most conventional of media, the Oakland East Bay Symphony devoted most of its generous March 14 program to Persia, a.k.a. Iran, drawing an unusually large crowd to the huge Paramount Theater, sprinkled with many Persian émigrés. This included a new audience of enthusiasts that clapped uninhibitedly after every song, every movement.            
            The biggest cheers followed the ringing introductory statement of Music Director Michael Morgan: “If we all come together instead of having our government tell us what to think of each other, we will have peace.”
            The Persian music heard here has definite, distinctive characteristics. In songs, lines of verse are often constructed on rainbow melodies, going up the register to the midpoint, then down. I could also spot some similarities to European gypsy music, with scales containing an augmented-second interval, as in our melodic minor---not too surprising, as the gypsies were concentrated in and around Persia during the first millennium A.D.   
            The best of these three works was the suite from the opera “Rostam and Sohrab” by Loris Tjeknavorian, 70. The varied 22-minute piece offers flamboyant brass and percussion, especially in the rousing finale, as well as a fetching violin solo (by co-concertmaster Dawn Harms). The syncopated Persian dances with their trickty rhythms and accents found the players a mite stiff, but willing, to cap the concert running a half-hour longer than the normal two-hour span. The composer attended and took bows before the standees.  
            The 1946 Second Piano Concerto of Aminollah Hussein is probably best for the modern concert-goer in a big hurry, offering a full three movements in just 14 minutes. Its thematic content is streamlined to the extreme and riddled with repetition. Its impact might have been augmented had the tidy soloist Tara Kamangar, who has just finished her studies at London’s Royal Academy, lent some brawn to the finale; her delicate play was largely swallowed up in the cavernous hall.  
            A set of six traditional Persian songs (tastefully arranged for orchestra by David Garner and the soloist) were realized by mezzo-soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmai, whose lyricism and stylistic know-how would have come to full fruition in a more intimate setting.  
            Oakland East Bay Symphony, Michael Morgan music director. Paramount Theater, Oakland. For info: (510) 625-8497, or go online.
        ©D. Rane Danubian 2008

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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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