"Love Fragments"

Performers:
Ashkan Behzadi, composition
Charlotte Mundy, soprano
Marina Kifferstein, violin

Programme:
New Piece for Soprano and Violin (commissioned work), approx. 80 min
Az hoosh mi.. for Soprano and Violin (2013), approx. 9 min

Ashkan Behzadi (b. 1983) is an Iranian-Canadian composer based in New York. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from Columbia University, where he studied with Fred Lerdahl, George Lewis, and Georg Friedrich Haas; he previously completed a Bachelor's in composition and music theory at McGill University under Chris Paul Harman and Brian Cherney. Behzadi is a recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Award 2026, the Ernst von Siemens Kompositionspreis 2025, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in musical composition for 2021-2022.

His aesthetic concerns centre on questions of genre identity and genre-crossing, and on the dialectical relationship between contemporary poetry and new music. Structurally, his music is marked by fine-grained detail, tracing an intimate, delicate lyrical landscape; through allusion and pastiche as compositional foundations, it evokes collective memories of folk music. In the portrait concert "Love Fragments", soprano Charlotte Mundy and violinist Marina Kifferstein perform his works.