Remarkable performance as concert goes on as the bombs drop

JS Bach, French Suite No 2 in C minor; Beethoven, Piano Sonata No in C minor ‘Appassionata’ Op57, first movement; Chopin, Barcarolle in F# major Op60; Mohammed Reza Darvishi, ‘Be Yad-e-Eghbal (in Memory of Eghbal) 1984 ; Hadi Rahmani,’Left Behind in Teheran’, 2025; Mohammed Ali Salahi, ‘Owzan Gah’, 2025

How DID she manage to do this? I don’t mean create a concert combining two different-sounding music cultures. I don’t mean securely holding her audience throughout its performance. And I don’t mean performing, explaining, delivering it all without a break for 75 minutes. Her bigger triumph inside this college chapel-house of western religion, was in somehow clamping down her own personal lid on the ravages of Middle Eastern religious and political conflict.

Mahya Mahroomi is a young post-graduate Master of Music of this Chichester University, teaching piano in the city’s community and freelancing as a musician. Her university-backed recital concept introduces western ears to new piano compositions, directly from the composers themselves, blending Persian musical language with European classical forms shapes her current concert-giving. Mahroomi’s presentation has already been heard in London. Two world premieres of music dedicated to her were on tonight’s playlist.

However, all was not well. Four days before this performance her preparations and composure were shattered. Her paternal family, her partner, and both composers suddenly had bombs and drones exploding all around their homes in the Iranian capital of Teheran. One of the composers had to abandon participating in this concert because flights here ceased. The other composer saw the house opposite his hit. By email to Mahroomi, he quickly titled new piece ‘Left Behind in Teheran’, then vanished into communication silence without forwarding to Mahroomi his own composer’s programme notes.

By yesterday, her family, friends and colleagues were fleeing this same city where Mahya Mahroomi had gained her Bachelor of Music degree at its University, having, she said, overcome cultural limitations to contunue pursuing her classical music passion.

I happened to know most of this in advance, and early on in her concert I could sense her unsettlement at the keyboard. The Bach Suite’s six short dance movements probably helped her press forward, re-concentrated and re-energised by each mood change. But next, the formidable Appassionata first movement – a title and a disturbing Beethovenian conception probably extremely close to her heart at any time, let alone now. It rang and raged through the Chapel. Yet from its strength and progress, it sounded like she wasn’t in the wholehearted and hyper-focused place needed for a great performance. After that, Chopin’s complexity and textural density confirmed her technical pianistic assurance, and perhaps the gondola song idea had a sustaining personal resonation for her.

The three Persian pieces were to come next. But it was now that the audience unexpectedly learned of her situation. And they recognised her courage, willpower and professionalism in accomplishing what she had, this far into the concert. In starting to explain the materials and nature of the Persian music, she outlined her situation, and that of her beseiged composers and loved ones. “It’s shocking and sad. I don’t know what to say,” she began. “I’ve tried to be brave. Their whereabouts is unknown.” There was applause at this.

Might it have been actually unprofessional to have gone into such a personal area? Surely not. It was utterly pertinent to the occasion and by confiding it with them, it enhanced the audience experience and perception. You can channel grief or loss into fine musical performance but can you fear, or life-threatening terror?

From this juncture, she played magnificently in projecting each new hybrid musical sound realm. Darvishi’s memorial work to Eghbal, a domestically-abused woman who committed suicide, incorporates Iranian modes worked in ambiguity, plus dissonant chords, single-motif development and variations. It was highly charged, urgent, intense, angry and desolate.

Rahmani’s ‘Left Behind in Teheran’ is in two movements, ostensibly pure music rather than emotional transmission. There’s a short prelude that is Persian folk music-themed, set in a traditional mode and sounding troubled. Then a fugue placing Iranian melodic and modal elements in western contrapuntal polyphonic textures and forms, while adding polymodality for extra character. The outline was smoothly contoured but its atmosphere resolute.

Salahi’s piece called Owzan Gah came across as the most multi-faceted of the three, and livelier with its title referencing its Persian scales with its rhythms syncopated and asymmetric. Its outlook is much more volatile and persistent, striving for freedom, angularly turbulent in shouting questions and getting aggressive answers, yet with flashes of possible humour. It will be on a 2026 recorded album including Mahroomi’s performances.

Mahroomi’s programme notes advise that an expressive essence of Persian melodic tradition is its simultaneous conveying of the abstract with the personal. Speaking to her audience, she added the caveat that a piano can voice western semi-tones but not the highly characteristic quarter-tones of this more eastern music. The heard evidence, to me, was that this apparent instrumental disadvantage softened the music’s harmonic edge and ruled out moments where quarter-tones sharply define the idiom and jab the western listener with a deeper glimpse of emotion. Stringed or wind instruments unlimited in this ability enable orchestral music, for instance, to clinch greater authenticity.

The overall audible feel of what we were hearing was of a piquant type of contemporary music, feeling quite mainstream, expressively connectable and relevant, and representative of Persian musical culture meeting western on a middle ground, and unfolding a further aspect and layer of music’s universality. In engineering this, Mahya Mahroomi is a welcome, emerging cultural intelligence.

See her video preview interview for this concert here: https://dai.ly/x9kpqky

Read the concert background here: https://musicinportsmouth.co.uk/profile-mahya-mahoomi-and-from-classical-roots-to-persian-resonance-at-the-university-of-chichester/

This was one of only two solo piano concerts in Festival of Chichester, arriving on consecutive days, the other given by Phillip James Leslies at the Bognor Regis in two separate performances on Tuesday. Closest to this, otherwise, are forthcoming recitals by a solo harpsichordist and a piano trio incorporating Michael Joseph’s musi-interpretative art.

Festival events here: https://festivalofchichester.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/festival-of-chichester-brochure-2025.pdf

Monday’s concert photo of Mahya Mahroomi by Andrew Worsfold.

Richard Amey