REVIEW BY Richard Amey

‘Classical Threads, Persian Colours’. Festival of Chichester concert at Chapel of The Ascension, Chichester University on Tuesday 23 June 2026 (7pm), by Mahya Mahroomi piano, Laleh Abbasi, Persian Ney (pipe), Ala Zarei, Persian Setar (4-string lute).

Programme –

Solo Piano: ‘Nocturnes’ by Erik Satie;

‘Persian Frame No 3’ by Mahdis Golzar Kashani, after 7 paintings by Mahmoud Farshchian.

Ney and Setar: two well-known classical Persian instrumental dances –

‘Chaharmezrab-e Dashti’ by Mohammad Reza Lotfi

‘Rang-e Dashti’ by Gholamhossein Bigje Khani.

Ney and Piano: two popular songs in instrumental performance –

Azebaijani folk song, ‘Ayriliq’ (‘Separation’), composed by Ali Salimi 1957

Persian song standard, ‘Morgh-e Sahar’ (‘The Dawn Bird’), words and music by Mohammed Taghi Bahar and Morteza Ney-Davood, first performed 1927, later recorded by singer Moluk Zarrabi.

‘Music for a Summer’s Evening’. It’s the commonest go-to concert title of the classical music off-season. The aim is an idealised atmosphere of warmth and relaxation, although the music – probably European, American or British – might be more emotionally and energetically wrought than ideal.

But here was a concert, unencumbered by such a cliché, that hit near-perfection of design for an exceptionally humid and sultry evening. In the heatwave, it shifted us somewhere different, into a halfway land between two climates and two cultures – of Persia and Europe. But like tea on a hot day, its effect was cooling. A chill-out concert was the result, and its shorter length, of one hour, was part of that perfection.

There’s a cross-cultural music bridge between the Persian and the European being demonstrated in her UK south concerts by Persian pianist Mahya Mahroomi (the ‘h’ is uttered in pronunciation). This was her second such one in consecutive annual Festivals of Chichester, and the more laid-back of the two. It presented Persian folk music’s traditional ambience, in contrast to the hybrid Persio-European classical compositions she premiered last year at this same venue.

A read through the titles above reveals the flavour and exemplifies how some Persian folk songs endure into traditional status yet (unlike ‘anon’) preserve their composer’s name as their popularity is celebrated. The two songs here carried topical world socio-political news relevance.

Composer Ali Salomi was a tar player – it’s a double-soundbowl, lambskin-topped guitar with six strings tuned in pairs – and his song sings of deep Azerbajani pain at their separation from loved ones by territorial division andthe Aras river at the Iran-Azerbaijani border.

The Dawn Bird’s lyricist, Mohammed Taghi Bahar, an expert player of the tak – a high-pitched Persian hand drum – casts a conversation between the poet and a caged bird as a freedom protest song against dictatorship. The Dawn Bird is reportedly in frequent adopted usage among today’s Iranian pro-democracy movers and thinkers.

Arranged and semi-improvised by Mahroomi and Abbasi for quiet piano and flute, these two songs in 6/8 time and the keys C minor and C, sounded comfortably tonal, the piano often simply chordal in popular easy listening mode, and they closed the concert. The lyrics remained unheard but the strophic tune was carried mainly by Abbasi’s 2½-octave ney, a straight reed pipe bound and lacquered in seven sections, coming in six lengths according to musical key. The pipe’s bottom end is protectively bound in copper, its mouth end in plastic tape. No mouthpiece, just an open tube with the player’s mouth embouchure dictating pitch and articulation.

Laleh Abbasi is of striking, black curly hair and was trousered, with a silent, calmly intense stage presence, constantly looking downward when not visually communicating or cueing with her fellow instrumentalist. Her sound was breathy, feather-edged and spread an exotically atmospheric feeling around the modern and spacious chapel acoustic.

With Mahroomi at the Steinway grand piano, all three women performed seated, wearing black or navy and grey. Although the western piano partnered the pipe successfully in the songs, it can’t speak in the ¼-tone intervals so freely and distinctively idiomatic on the Persian instruments, when either keyed and overblown on the ney, or fretted or bent on the setar. So Abbasi and Ala Zarei duoed alone and created their own distinctive street or room ambience during their pair of dances.

Less than a year performing together, their combination contrasts, with Zarei eager, outgoing, smiling, in a belted, button-through dress, the setar on her cross-legged lap and she in frequent co-ordinating eye contact with Abbasi. The setar has a mandolin-shaped belly, a long narrow neck, and four strings. The bass string is a drone, thumbed by the right hand while the other three are fingered.

The dance music was light and springy, sometimes intricate and virtuosic, the tunes sometimes shared in unison or batted back in question and response. The Iranian classical Chaharmezrab-e came in energetic four-beat measure, then the Persian classical Rang-e in a happy six.

Mahroomi’s concert set out eastwards from a Paris night in the five Nocturnes of Erik Satie which will appear on her forthcoming album for Base2 Music. She froze the time of day for the audience and with this distinctive composer’s work of 1919 established the evening’s musical character which was, as she wrote among her valuable informative programme notes, “where simplicity becomes a powerful means of conveying mystery, elegance and contemplation.”

After this restrained and soothing concert curtain raiser, she touched on the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in the third of seven miniature paintings by Mahmoud Farshchian, interpreted by composer Mahdis Golzar Kashani in his ‘Persian Frames’. It’s of another politically stricken bird, the painting entitled ‘What Price Freedom?’ and with Mahroomi writing, “Shackles weigh down the helpless bird as she watches others take flight around her. Unable to fly away, her colourless body represents her hopelessness.”

The sustained piano bass held down the captive bird, but sounded in undertow and tonal opposition to the notes and chords of the right hand voicing the liberty-seeking bird. The music’s culmination was of a noble striving towards a final upward groping that left despairingly unresolved. Compositionally, it showed the strength and potential of classical music when going to work and active communication, unbounded by international fencing.

In her future concerts, Mahya Mahroomi will doubtless have more to share with us of mutual cultural exchange and connection. The Festival of Chichester need our applause for giving her a West Sussex platform for a second time.

Richard Amey

Forthcoming concerts

Tuesday 7 July – Christ Church Lunchtimes (12.30): Yoko Ono piano.

Tuesday 18 August – Christ Church Lunchtimes (12.30): Ansel Chaloner-Hughes (WPO Composer In Residence) piano.

Tuesday 8 September – Christ Church Lunchtimes (12.30): Evelyn Harrison clarinet, Beatrice Sales violin, Zhanna Kemp piano.

Sunday 13 September – Worthing Symphony Orchestra 100th Season opening concert at Assembly Hall (2.45): Kalinnikov, Tsar Boris Overture; Mozart, Piano Concerto No 27 (Isata Kanneh-Mason piano), Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6 Pathetique.