Summerwinds Festival: Joolaee Trio & Parisa Saeednezhad: Schnittstellen, Amalgame

Joolaee Trio & Parisa Saeednezhad - clarinet
Misagh Joolaee - kamancheh
Schaghajegh Nosrati - piano
Sebastian Flaig - percussion

Highly expressive and sonically rich, with lush harmonies, vivid melodies and pulsing rhythms: the German-Iranian Joolaee Trio has forged its own musical language - an innovative blend of cultures in which the divide between West and East, Persian and European classical music, jazz, tradition and modernity simply dissolves.

Misagh Joolaee plays the kamancheh, the Iranian spike fiddle with its raw, smoky, nasal tone. Schaghajegh Nosrati is a classical pianist who broke through internationally with her Bach recordings. Sebastian Flaig is an ethno and jazz percussionist. Together they form one of the most remarkable chamber ensembles around. Their guest, Iranian-born Parisa Saeednezhad - who, like the trio, is based in Germany - plays the Western clarinet with virtuosic command and brings improvisational flair and Persian timbres to the mix.

In "Schnittstellen, Amalgame", Saeednezhad argues that Western music has "always" had points of contact between the major-minor system and other scale systems - the so-called modes. The duple, triple and quadruple metres that dominate here were regularly combined with asymmetric rhythms. Art music has renewed itself precisely by enthusiastically absorbing the "foreign" - folk music being the prime example. The Tehran-born clarinettist plays Bartók's "Romanian Folk Dances" alongside "Four Hebrew Pictures" by the Russian-American clarinettist Simeon Bellison, rooted in the East European klezmer tradition. Moving beyond major and minor, Olivier Messiaen listened to birdsong in his search for spiritual transcendence and developed entirely personal modes - among them the material for the deeply moving clarinet solo "The Abyss of the Birds".

Misagh Joolaee's compositions draw on the Radif, an ancient collection of more than 350 gushehs - melodies, motifs and modes.