TEHRAN- Iranian tar and setar virtuoso Keyvan Saket will hold a concert in Tehran’s Vahdat Hall together with his music group, Vaziri Music Band, on November 25.

In the upcoming concert, prominent Iranian singer Vahid Taj will accompany Saket and his band as the vocalist, Honaronline reported.

Saket and Vaziri Band, comprising 15 instrumentalists, have also planned to perform across Iran, the details of which will be announced soon.

Saket, 63, is an acclaimed composer and music researcher. He established the Vaziri Band in 1996 and has since performed numerous pieces with them. The band’s primary goal was to bring about a revival of the traditional style of Iranian master Col. Alinaghi Vaziri. Together with the band, Saket has held many concerts in Iran, Canada, and Australia.

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. 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.

Born in in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province, Saket joined the Aref Ensemble under the leadership of the late musician Parviz Meshkatian in 1989. His collaboration with the ensemble continued steadily into 1996 and they released several albums and performed extensively throughout Iran and abroad.

SS/SAB