Show Highlights Iranian Women : Classical music: The program tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre hopes to draw attention to Iran’s female musicians, unable to perform in their country since 1979.

Along with the other upheavals that followed the rise to power of Islamic fundamentalists in Iran’s 1979 revolution, the role of women in that society was sharply proscribed. For one thing, women musicians were prevented from performing in public.

“By doing that, we lost half of our culture,” says Soroush Izadi, who had been one of the leading female singers of Iranian classical music. “I think music is the main part of the culture of a society, and suddenly half of us were not allowed to contribute to it.”

At the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight and Jan. 26 at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theatre, Izadi will take part in a program intended to highlight the plight of Iran’s female musicians. The performances were organized by Oshagh, a Southern California-based Iranian ensemble whose vibrant approach to their country’s traditional music recalls Ireland’s Chieftains, minus the Guinness stout.

Izadi, who now lives in Vienna, discussed her music and her homeland recently over a meal at a Santa Ana Persian restaurant. Serving as Farsi-English translator was Oshagh spokesman and tombek hand drum player Reza Torchizy, a dermatologist by day who lives in Irvine.

A doctor herself, Izadi was situated better than most women in Iran following the revolution, in which pro-Ayatollah Khomeini forces deposed the Shah. As a pediatrician in an increasingly doctor-poor nation, she was accorded a degree of respect.

“As a physician I was free to work,” she said. “I was offered a good salary and position, but I wasn’t able to do my job in music. And though I was respected when working in a hospital, I would see, for example, how nurses were treated. They wouldn’t let them be free as human beings, and I felt that pressure on myself. That was difficult to watch, but it was because of the music that I left.”

To Izadi, her country’s traditional classical repertoire represents the heart of Iran.

“The songs that I sing come piece by piece through our oral tradition, and they remind me of the history and the beauty of my culture,” she said. “In it is the good and bad, the happiness, the sadness. It holds the feelings of the events that happened both in the history of my life and of Iran. It is all this they tried to suppress in Iran.”

Now 43, Izadi began singing at 10 and spent 12 years at the Tehran Conservatory of Music. While attending medical school, she performed with the Tehran University Orchestra, and went on to frequent performances on stage, radio and television, as well as making dozens of recordings.

All that halted in 1979, and in 1982 she fled the country with her family. She moved to Vienna, which has an expatriate Iranian population of 60,000, and began the long process of getting her medical license again. She also began doing concerts in Germany, Italy and France, and made one previous U.S. tour four years ago.

Though Izadi loses money when she leaves her medical practice to sing, she said, “I am following my goal. This is what I feel I should be doing. I’m losing money, this is obvious. But there are many physicians like me, and in music there are not many singers like me. My personal belief is that there is just one other woman in Iranian music who sings like me and she is in Iran right now, and is not allowed to use her voice.”

The classical singer she is talking about, Parisa, was allowed last year to perform for the first time since the revolution--for a single small concert held for an exclusively female audience.

According to Torchizy, the government has begun to loosen its rigid controls in the past two years, allowing some women musicians, if not singers, to perform in public, though they must cover their heads. Torchizy, for one, feels encouraged that other reforms will follow and hopes that in a couple of years Oshagh will be able to perform in its members’ home country.

Native classical music, at least as performed by men, has flourished in the past few years in Iran, in large part because most other forms of music have been banned. The government at first tried to ban classical music, too, Torchizy said, but they encountered too much resistance from the public.

Some of the forms and conventions of the music predate Jesus; it also allows a freedom of interpretation and room for improvisation that in some respects remind Torchizy of American jazz. The music relies both on quarter-tone scales and beguiling rhythmic divisions of five, seven or even 13-beat measures, played on ancient instruments, such as the kamancheh , a violin-family instrument with a banjo-like animal-skin head, and the santur , a 72-stringed hammered dulcimer.

Torchizy said tonight’s program, titled “Oshagh Plays in Honor of the Ladies Iranian Classical Music,” was arranged “as a demonstration to let the Iranian government know that we don’t agree with the way they don’t let the women musicians perform like the men. So we are doing it exactly the other way, the way it should be: We will go on with nine lady musicians and singers and nine gentlemen, because we wanted to show the equality.”

Even if Iran should again allow her to sing, Izadi said she would have grave reservations about returning there to live.

“When I was 10 years old, my father let us go to the music conservatory, to dance, to everything,” she said. “I lived as a free human being. How can I now take my two small girls over there to the situation of oppression women live under in Iran? I’m waiting for great changes before I’d return.”

“Oshagh Plays in Honor of the Ladies Iranian Classical Music” begins tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $20 to $25. Presented by the Network of Iranian Professionals of Orange County. Information: (714) 854-4646.