In Monday’s (3/14) San Jose Mercury News (California), Cheryl North writes, “I’ve often thought that Michael Morgan ought to go into politics. … His concert programming [at the Oakland East Bay Symphony] tends to span the globe geographically.” Morgan is Oakland East Bay Symphony’s music director. “Consider the concert celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year that Morgan is leading at 8 p.m. Friday at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Morgan explains the choice of programming: ‘We have a huge community of Iranians and Middle Easterners in the Bay Area. We need to get to know something more about their history and culture.’ … OEBS program will include Persian music served up alongside Beethoven’s effervescent Triple Concerto. While Beethoven was as Germanic as composers come, the musicians playing the solo Concerto parts are all Persian-born: Tara Kamangar, piano; Cyrus Beroukhim, violinist; and Arash Amini, cellist. Persian works on the program are Ahmad Pejman’s 1975 ‘Symphonic Sketches’; Behzad Ranjbaran’s new work, ‘Seemorgh’ (‘The Phoenix’); and three movements of Omid Zoufonoun’s poetic ‘Manteq al-Tayr’ (‘Language of the Birds’), with Amin Zoufonoun performing on the kamencheh, a Persian-style bowed lute, sometimes called a spike fiddle.”
Posted March 15, 2011
