Walker Art Center and Schubert Club present
Kayhan Kalhor
and Brooklyn Rider
Friday, October 29, 2021
8 pm (CDT), McGuire Theater
Brooklyn Rider
Johnny Gandelsman, violin
Colin Jacobsen, violin
Nicholas Cords, viola
Michael Nicolas, cello
and
Kayhan Kalhor
kamancheh
with
Mathias Kunzli
percussion
Program
Atashgah
Colin Jacobsen (b. 1978)
Beloved, do not let me be discouraged
Colin Jacobsen
Persian kamancheh improvisation
Kayhan Kalhor (b. 1963)
Silent City
Kayhan Kalhor
Arr. Ljova (b. 1978)
Program length: approximately 75 minutes without intermission.
The Walker Art Center and Schubert Club dedicate this evening's concert to the memory of Pamela Espeland, much loved Twin Cities arts journalist.
Notes
Atashgah - Colin Jacobsen
Sometimes a person and place can affect you in ways that you wouldn't have imagined at the time...
When Nick Cords and I visited Kayhan Kalhor in Iran in the summer of 2004 on a cultural exchange grant made possible by the Silk Road Project, one of the things we saw was an ancient fire temple, or Atashgah, a little outside of the city of Esfahan. Originally built as a holy site for the Zoroastrian religion in the Sassanid period of Iran's history (3rd-6th centuries AD), its flames have probably not been lit in centuries, but it still feels like a place of great power; a place where you become aware of layers of history. For me, the experience of listening to Kayhan play music is often like watching a fire in a fireplace; it is mesmerizing, hypnotic, and yet constantly changing. His music comes from a deep inner creative fire. When I returned from Iran that summer, I felt the need to do something with what I had heard and experienced. I've been attempting to write and arrange music ever since, hoping I caught at least a spark of that creative fire.
- Colin Jacobsen
Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged - Colin Jacobsen
The title of Beloved, do not let me be discouraged comes from a line of 16th century Turkish poetry by Fuzuli and is taken from his version of the legendary tale of Layli and Magnun, a story about ill-fated lovers that has many obvious parallels to Romeo and Juliet. To be magnun is literally to be crazy for love, and we first learned about this widely popular story in the Middle East and beyond during our trip to Iran. In our ears, Persian music expresses a deep desire to lose oneself in love. With a performer like Kayhan, this desire is communicated vividly, even to someone completely unfamiliar with the tradition. Additionally, the piece has links to the troubadours of 14th century Italy. The idea of medieval courtly love was a central theme of the music and poetry of the troubadours, and the very idea of this sort of ennobling love was influenced by early Arabic literature. During the 14th century, Persia and Italy enjoyed strong connections through trade in luxury goods, architecture, art and metalwork. One of our early impressions of Kayhan’s instrument was that it seemed to evoke the sound world of Europe before the advent of the modern family of string instruments when the voices of early string instruments such as the rebec, the Renaissance fiddle and the lira da braccio were more humanistic, natural and intimate.
Colin, the composer of Beloved, describes the process of pulling together the material as follows:
Much inspiration for this piece came from working within that creative cauldron, the Silk Road Ensemble, with Alim Qasimov, the great Azeri Mugham singer, on a chamber version of Hajibeyov’s opera, Layla and Majnun. There was a melodic fragment that caught my ear, and after working with it for a while it developed into the rhythmic piece that forms the second half of Beloved, do not let me be discouraged. This represents the feverish longing of the lover for his or her beloved and the divine inspiration that the mere thought of him or her brings.
At the same time that I was working on this Layla and Majnun-inspired piece, I stumbled across the genre of sacred songs called Laude which were sung in the vernacular in 14th century Italy. There was a striking similarity of devotional feeling characterized by joyful praise and ecstatic penitence between these Laude and the Layla and Majnun theme. Apparently, the genre is related to the music of the troubadours of France and Spain in the earlier Middle Ages whose music in turn may be related to the Middle Eastern idealization of a beloved.
One particular Laude, “Plangiamo,” gave me the proverbial goose bumps on first hearing. It happened to be in the same mode as the rhythmic piece I had already written but was in a free, improvised and rhetorical style that I thought would make a great introduction to Beloved, do not let me be discouraged if some thought were given to a specific arrangement for our ensemble. This “Plangiamo” is the kind of melody that reveals more and more of itself each time it’s heard, much the way a beloved, divine or human, can give one an endless feeling of wonder.
—Nicholas Cords
Silent City - Kayhan Kalhor (Arr. Ljova)
When we performed Silent City a few years ago in Berkeley, California, we were deeply moved when a small group of audience members from New Orleans found us afterwards and, nearly in tears, told us that the piece had acted as a balm for their harrowing experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina. Though the piece was sparked by the destruction of Hallabjah in Kurdistan Iraq, it was always intended to serve as a universal testament to fallen cities and civilizations. But even more central to Silent City is the idea that life always returns, sprouting anew out of the empty landscape. Commissioned through the Silk Road Project in conjunction with a Harvard University course entitled “First Nights,” the piece allowed us to develop Kayhan’s ideas amongst ourselves and through the collective ear and life experience of the class itself. The variety of observations and personal anecdotes in response to our musical ideas was truly inspiring and allowed two things to happen: It gave us a greater awareness of the emotional content encoded in the music and it inspired our sense of the piece as an open dialogue between performers and audience members. The musical narrative itself unfolds in reverse-time. The opening scene is a whispered and sparse musical atmosphere, evoking a world in which a disaster has occurred, either through humanity’s own hands or by the destructive forces of nature. The echoes of distant voices return, slowly building in intensity toward an urgent climax and point of release. This substantial first portion of the piece is completely improvised, allowing us to collectively work within the mode to create a visceral sense of that barren world. We employ a variety of techniques including independent loops, call and response, echoes, and the intoning of open harmonies to reflect the slowly changing emotional landscape. A lamenting chant sings out afterwards on the kamancheh, employing a traditional melody from Turkey. This leads into a Kurdish melody that repeats itself above a densely shifting harmonic world, ultimately yielding to a joyful dance in 7/8 meter that vividly depicts life flowing back again.
—Nicholas Cords
About the artists
Kayhan Kalhor
Three-time GRAMMY nominee Kayhan Kalhor is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh, who through his many musical collaborations has been instrumental in popularizing Persian music in the West and is a creative force in today’s music scene. His performances of traditional Persian music and multiple collaborations have attracted audiences around the globe. He has studied the music of Iran’s many regions, in particular those of Khorason and Kordestan, and has toured the world as a soloist with various ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is co-founder of the renowned ensembles Dastan, Ghazal: Persian & Indian Improvisations and Masters of Persian Music. Kayhan Kalhor has composed works for Iran’s most renowned vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri and has also performed and recorded with Iran’s greatest instrumentalists. He has composed music for television and film and was most recently featured on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Copolla’s Youth Without Youth in a score that he collaborated on with Osvaldo Golijov. In 2004, Kayhan was invited by American composer John Adams to give a solo recital at Carnegie Hall as part of his Perspectives Series and in the same year he appeared on a double bill at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, sharing the program with the Festival Orchestra performing the Mozart Requiem. Kayhan is a member of Silkroad Ensemble (founded by Yo-Yo Ma) and his compositions appear on several of the Ensemble’s albums.
Brooklyn Rider
With their gripping performance style and unquenchable appetite for musical adventure, Brooklyn Rider has carved a singular space in the world of string quartets over their fifteen-year history. Defining the string quartet as a medium with deep historic roots and endless possibility for invention, they find equal inspiration in musical languages ranging from late Beethoven to Persian classical music to American roots music to the endlessly varied voices of living composers. Claiming no allegiance to either end of the historical spectrum, Brooklyn Rider most comfortably operates within the long arc of the tradition, seeking to illuminate works of the past with fresh insight while coaxing the malleable genre into the future through an inclusive programming vision, deep-rooted collaborations with a wide range of global tradition bearers, and the creation of thoughtful and relevant frames for commissioning projects.
The upcoming concert season is strongly illustrative of the intrepid musical appetite of Brooklyn Rider. This coming fall, they will premiere a major new work by the great Argentinian composer and close friend, Osvaldo Golijov. The quartet also has two new collaborative projects for 2021-22. One is with Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital, and the other is a brand new phase of work with tenor Nicholas Phan, where they will explore the music of Franz Schubert and Rufus Wainwright. Looking further into the future, they will expand work already underway with Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and will launch a major new commissioning venture for the 2022-23 season called The Four Elements; an exploration of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) as metaphor for both the complex inner world of the string quartet and the current health of planet Earth.
Prior to the global pandemic, the 2019-20 season saw a veritable explosion of new projects and releases. Shared at the height of the US lockdown, the Grammy®-nominated recording Healing Modes (In A Circle Records) presented Beethoven’s towering Opus 132 — the composer’s late testament on healing and the restorative power of new creation — interwoven with five new commissions powerfully exploring topics as wide-ranging as the US-Mexico border conflict, the Syrian refugee crisis, the mental health epidemic, and physical well-being. Described by The New Yorker as a project which "...could not possibly be more relevant or necessary than it is currently," the composers include Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts, Caroline Shaw, and Du Yun.
Earlier in the same season saw the release of two projects from vastly different musical spheres. One with the master Irish fiddler Martin Hayes (In A Circle Records), an album which the Irish Times described as “a masterclass in risk-taking,” and the other, Sun On Sand (Nonesuch Records), featuring the music of Patrick Zimmerli with saxophone giant Joshua Redman and fellow collaborators Scott Colley on bass and Satoshi Takeishi, percussion.
In fall 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera. Celebrating the power of beauty as a political act, Dreamers amplifies the visionary artistry of Violeta Parra, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gilberto Gil, Joao Gilberto, Octavio Paz, and others, all who dared to dream under repressive regimes. Featuring gems from the Ibero-American songbook in evocative arrangements by Jaques Morelenbaum, Diego Schissi, Gonzalo Grau, Guillermo Klein, and Brooklyn Rider’s own Colin Jacobsen, Dreamers topped numerous charts and garnered a Grammy® nomination for best arrangement (Gonzalo Grau’s “Niña”). Touring widely to support the album, they appeared at venues ranging from New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center to Mexico City’s Deco masterpiece, the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Brooklyn Rider has remained steadfast in their commitment to generate new music for string quartet at nearly every phase of their history. To kick off the 2017-18 season, Brooklyn Rider released Spontaneous Symbols (In a Circle Records), featuring new commissions by Tyondai Braxton, Evan Ziporyn, Paula Matthusen, Kyle Sanna, and Colin Jacobsen. In the 2015-16 season, the group celebrated its tenth anniversary with the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary project The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured 15 specially commissioned works by musicians from the worlds of folk, jazz, and indie rock, each inspired by a different artistic muse. The Fiction Issue, with singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, featured his composition which was premiered in 2012 at Carnegie Hall by Kahane, Brooklyn Rider, and Shara Nova. Additionally, Brooklyn Rider has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with the music of the iconic American composer Philip Glass, which began with 2011’s much-praised recording Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass and continued with two subsequent installments of Glass’s works for string quartet, all released on the composer’s label Orange Mountain Music. Numerous other collaborations have helped give rise to NPR Music’s observation that Brooklyn Rider is “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” During the 2016-17 season, Brooklyn Rider released an album entitled So Many Things on Naïve Records with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, comprising music by Colin Jacobsen, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Björk, Sting, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello, among others. Some Of A Thousand Words, an evening-length program with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, was an intimate series of duets and solos in which the quartet’s live onstage music is a dynamic and central creative component. Some Of A Thousand Words was featured at the 2016 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, before two U.S. tours, including a week-long run at New York City’s Joyce Theater. A collaboration with Dance Heginbotham with music written by Colin Jacobsen resulted in Chalk And Soot, an evening-length work presented by Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival in 2014. Brooklyn Rider has also frequently teamed up with banjoist Béla Fleck, with whom they appeared on two different albums, 2017’s Juno Concerto and 2013’s The Impostor. And in one of their longest-standing musical friendships to date, Brooklyn Rider and Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor released the highly praised recording Silent City (World Village) in 2008, still touring the project to this day.
MATHIAS KUNZLI
Hailing from Switzerland, multi-disciplined drummer/percussionist Mathias Kunzli has become ubiquitous in the New York City music scene and has made Los Angeles is second home. As a teenager he became the drummer for the Swiss Youth Jazz Orchestra, received two scholarships from Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music and moved to the United States in 1995.
Kunzli’s desire and ability to adapt to a wide range of musical styles have enabled him to tour extensively in six continents and he has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, arenas, and festivals including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Royal Festival Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Outside Lands Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, and many more. National TV appearances in the US include: Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Colbert Report, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Good Morning America, The Late Late Show with James Corden, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Besides having recorded on well over a hundred albums, Mathias released his first solo-album. “Playground” is a live recording of an all-improvised solo-show in NYC. As a drummer and percussionist he has had the chance to collaborate with artists as varied as Regina Spektor, Moby, Lauryn Hill, the Silkroad Ensemble (founded by Yo-Yo Ma), Vieux Farka Toure, John Zorn’s Electric Masada, Hal Crook, Jamey Haddad, Yanka Roupkina, Theodosii Spassov, Bakithi Kumalo, Savina Yannatou, The Paul Winter Consort, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Matt Dariau, Frank London, Gina Gershon, Kayhan Kalhor, Mary Wilson, Steve Gorn, Howard Johnson, Brooklyn Rider, Steff La Cheffe, and Erika Stucky, among others. Some current projects and artistic collaborations include Regina Spektor, Ljova and the Kontraband, Jihae, Pharaoh's Daughter, Rashanim, Blivet, Duke Bojadziev, and Sarah Alden.
WALKER ART CENTER STAFF
Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts – Philip Bither
Senior Program Officer, Performing Arts – Julie Voigt
Associate Curator, Performing Arts - Doug Benidt
Administrator & Curatorial Assistant, Performing Arts - Molly Hanse
Development Associate, Special Projects – Megan Dunn
Performing Arts Specialist, Visitor Experience – Rosa Raarup
Visitor Experience Associates – Jazz Castañeda, Lilly Knopf, Rahsaan Lee, Michelle Maser, Deborah Meyer, and Sam Larom
Production Manager – Wyatt Heatherington Tilka
Lighting Designer – Jon Kirchhofer
Audio Supervisor – Douglas Livesay
Acknowledgments
Producers' Council
Premier Partner
Technology Partner
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Thank you, Walker members, for your generous support.
Schubert Club Acknowledgments
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