Iran under the piano keys

A record is first and foremost notes, sometimes words, a journey. But it can also be a discovery, a revelation. Scheherazadethe new opus by Lausanne-based Iranian pianist Layla Ramezan, is one of them... and a fine one at that! A revelation of the unsuspected vigor of "learned" music in the land of poets and the heirs of the great Darius, brought to life by an instrument that is not only a masterpiece, but also a source of inspiration. a priori as incompatible with the microtonal finesse and other modal flavours of the age-old Persian tradition as the piano. Scheherazade is an ambitious nine-part fresco by Alireza Mashayekhi (* 1940), one of the pioneers of modern Iranian music, interspersed with poetic breaths from his own pen. A work that sweeps you away - that grips you as much as it soothes you - and that constitutes "the pinnacle of the composer's philosophical and spiritual journey through a comprehensive polyphonic theory elaborated by himself and structured from the monophonic architecture of Persian music", as he himself explains on the sleeve.

This instability, typical of travel, reflects Alireza Mashayekhi's journey from Tehran to Vienna, where Hanns Jelinek opened a thousand and one doors to Western music of the 20th century.^e He then moved on to Utrecht, where he worked for fifteen years with the Sonology Institute, before returning to Iran in the early 1990s to lay the foundations for "local" formations designed to bring to the stage a new generation of uncomplicated Iranian creators - in other words, those who succeed in fusing Western and Persian heritages without betraying them. But this journey is also that of Layla Ramezan, an Iranian pianist who left to perfect her art in Paris and then Lausanne (where she studied with Christian Favre and Marc Pantillon at the HEMU), and who today appears extremely proud to offer Western ears a little of her native East, on the keys of a piano (which often goes unheard in Iran, where it has flourished for nearly two centuries), escorted by Keyvan Chemirani's zarb and santur improvisations and the narration of her father, Djamchid Chemirani, as if from the depths of time. This second volume of an anthology published by Paraty, which will ultimately comprise four volumes, takes us on multiple journeys: four discs to retrace "100 years of Iranian piano music"... and to escape!

Sheherazade, by Alireza Mashayekhi. Layla Ramezan plays 100 Years of Iranian Piano Music. Vol. 2. Paraty 519240