Rhythm Prevails in Classical Persian Fare

By the time they got to the end of their first encore Saturday evening at the Japan America Theatre, it was not surprising to find Persian classical musicians Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor and Pejman Haddadi all with drums in their hands. The genre is noted for the complexity and flexibility of its modal collections, but this time it was rhythm that held sway in great, cresting waves of pulsed energy.

Not that melodic inspiration was in short supply. Head of the Tehran Conservatory and a faculty member at CalArts, Alizadeh is an impressively accomplished master of the itar, a long-necked Persian lute with some of the twang of the sitar. His tautly coiled improvisations in the Bayat Tork modal system, which opened the lengthy concert, held worlds of supple nuance within compressed-pitch ranges. The focused fervor of his playing has a very direct emotional power, something the spiraling melodic material only concentrates.

Equally virtuosic were Kalhor--on the kamancheh, a spiked fiddle played like a miniature cello--and percussionist Haddadi. The husky sound of the kamancheh, capable of enormous inflection, came more to the fore in the second-half set of improvisations on Iranian folk songs, some also sung expressively by Kalhor. Alizadeh turned fluently to other Persian plucked-string instruments, and Haddadi continued to lay down dynamic rhythmic patterns.

Vociferous in its approval, the large audience in attendance drew the trio back for two encores and might be there still had the house lights not come up and the curtain finally come down.