TEHRAN-Iranian tar and setar virtuoso Keyvan Saket and Japanese violinist Tsumuzi are set to perform in Tokyo, Japan, in March.

Traditional Iranian music will be performed at Libra Hall in Tokyo on March 7 and 8 in a concert where Keyvan Saket will play tar and setar, Tsumuzi will play the violin, and Siavash Saket and Daisuke Takeuchi will accompany them with tombak and piano respectively.

The event will be organized by the embassy of Iran in Japan with the cooperation of Minato City, a special ward in the Tokyo Metropolis, ISNA reported.

Saket, 62, is an acclaimed Iranian composer and music researcher. He has been featured in Japanese music textbooks. He has held many concerts in Iran, Canada, and Australia. He established the Vaziri Band in 1996 and has since performed numerous pieces with them. He has also worked with many great Iranian musicians, including the late Parviz Meshkatian.

Saket is the fastest tar and setar (traditional Iranian instruments) player in Iran. He has always believed in introducing Iranian traditional music to the world. One of his ways of doing so was to promote through his shows what Iranian instruments were capable of playing.

To demonstrate this, he tried to perform well-known pieces from classical composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Paganini, Vivaldi, Strauss, and more. This mission seemed impossible at first; tar was played with plectrum and most of western classical pieces with the violin - a bowed string instrument. This meant that a tar player had to have a very quick plectrum to keep a rapid repetition of one note, or a tremolo. And yet, Saket was the only one with an impossibly blistering speed.

Along with his traditional albums, Saket released two modern albums that once again stunned everyone. In his albums, he performed extremely fast and complex pieces like “The Flight of the Bumblebee”. His astonishing performance at the International Music Exposition in France in 2006, showed the significance of tar and setar globally.

Tsumuzi is a Japanese composer and violinist known as the “Noble Prince of 5 Beats,” the “Noble Prince of Variations,” and “Mr. Asymmetrical Meters”. He is a musician and a licensed doctor who graduated from a national medical school in Tokyo. Since the release of the music video for his masterpiece “Ore no Libertango" (My Libertango), which has regularly topped jazz charts around the world, and his first overseas concert in Spain, he has established himself as a world-renowned maestro with five-beat and odd time signatures.

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