Concert Review by Lou Wigdor Visa Trouble West of
the Silk Road |
![]() A call to the Fine Arts Center box office confirmed my suspicions. Kalhor would neither be on the program nor in the zip code. The reason: in the post-September 11 cosmos, he had encountered “visa problems.” That Kalhor was no stranger to American audiences didn’t matter a quaver. In the spring of 2000, he had given a series of recitals in over a dozen American cities, with tarist Hossein Alizadeh and Iran’s greatest singer, Shajarian. Kalhor has also established his credentials in the West as a composer. The Kronos Quartet has recorded one of his compositions on its recent CD, Caravan. And Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project is performing a composition by Kalhor featuring -- what else? -- kamancheh and cello. So what happened at the concert? Sujaat Khan, who teaches at UCLA and is the son and celebrated protégé of India’s second most famous sitarist, Vilyat Khan, brilliantly performed several ragas with a tabla player--the latter himself a last-minute replacement for the original tabla player, who had remained in India with -- you guessed it -- visa issues. It was masterful; but it wasn’t the special synthesis that has distinguished Ghazal. To evoke the Ghazalian spirit, Khan spoke to the audience about links between classical Persian and Northern Indian music-including shared scalar modes, rhythms, and improvisational objectives. As a coda to the concert, he sang a devotional Sufi hymn in Persian. Earlier in the evening, UMass Asian
Dance & Music director Ranjanaa Devi and emeritus music professor
Fred Tillis added constructive light to the proceedings. Both
emphasized the importance of music and the arts in transcending
political and geographical boundaries. Devi informed the audience
about K |
©2001 by Lou Wigdor |
Hosted by Pioneer Valley Folklore Society |