TEHRAN – Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and Turkish baglama player Erdal Erzincan have teamed up to perform a duet during the 19th Offest festival in Skopje, Macedonia.

The performance will take place at the Macedonian Philharmonic on November 10, the organizers have announced.
    
OFFest was established in 2002 as a second festival, which grew up from the long-established tradition of the Skopje Jazz Festival. 

The main idea was to create another important music event in a different period of the year, and in terms of music genres, more widely oriented.

The festival presents a variety of music from all continents, focusing on different categories from traditional, ethno, folk and roots to urban, contemporary and experimental music styles.

Kalhor and Erzincan have mesmerized Eastern music enthusiasts during many duets in Tehran, Istanbul, Rotterdam, Schiltigheim and many other cities around the world.

In a statement, the Offest 2020 organizers praised Kalhor as a five-time Grammy Award nominee whose “one of the most exciting of his innumerable projects and unique collaborations that have attracted audiences around the globe is his duo with the renowned Turkish baglama player Erdal Erzincan.”

Their album “The Wind” was released in 2006 by ECM and their collaboration has remained vibrant ever since.

“The classical music traditions of Persia and of Ottoman Turkey that inspire the music of Kalhor and Erzincan share a great deal in common, including the ancient modal compositional system known as maqam, and the idea of improvisation plays a definitive role in their intensely spiritual and emotional performances.

“Their music is thoroughly modern and seeks to bring the listener into its trance-like realm by interweaving ecstatic rhythms with sensual melodic phrases. The result is a set of instrumental compositions that flow into each other like one continuous work, with gently drifting passages, in which the two instruments echo and improvise on different phrases.”

The eight-day festival opened with a performance by Spanish singer Silvia Perez Cruz on November 3. 

Photo: Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor (L) and Turkish baglama player Erdal Erzincan in an undated photo.

MMS/YAW