Night of Iranian composers – Tehran Contemporary Music Festival

Night of Iranian composers
On the flute recital of Kelariz Keshavarz in the Fourth Tehran Contemporary Music Festival
by Mehdi seyedinejad

Third night of stage performances of the fourth Tehran Contemporary Music Festival at Roudaki hall was dedicated to the flute recital of Kelariz Keshavarz. This was the only concert in the festival with pieces chosen solely from Iranian composers. Ten pieces from different composers were presented; from Alireza Mashayekhi to Said Alijani and Amin Sharifi. Except the two pieces by Alireza Mashayekhi, the rest of the repertoire have been composed between 2016-2018 and this was the premier for some of them. As by the performer, this recital is a part of a greater project called “New Waves of Iran” which is going to perform works of twenty Iranian composers. Except one piece by Ali Radman –“Cold Moments is Darrus”- composed for flute and electronic sounds, the rest of the repertoire was performed by solo flute.

“In Search of Lost Time” by Alireza Mashayekhi is the first piece -surprisingly out of the pre-announced program- that greets us. Kelariz Keshavarz’s bold and brave performance of this piece suggests a standard and quality performance. Each piece had its own challenge for the player: “The Sleepwalker Sonnet” by Rouzbeh Rafiei demanded multiple timbres; “Monologue for the loneliness of composer II” by Amin Sharifi required the player to present the theme from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in the middle of different variations; and discovering the logic of phrasing was the challenge of Alireza Mashayekhi’s “Permutation” (one of the first flute pieces of Mashayekhi composed in 1968). Despite all these, Keshavarz moved from one challenge to the next and performed a clear execution to the audience. Part of this high quality was a result of the performers understanding of importance of silence in interpreting and performing contemporary music pieces. In the absence of rhythm and tonality, silence plays a crucial role in understanding the articulation and recognizing each phrase and longitude of each silence (which is left for the player to decide is some cases) can be vitally important in understanding different parts of a piece.