6 Middle East composers, and why you should know them

In April 2023 Esfahani joined us at the Southbank Centre to perform a programme which platformed Renaissance harpsichord pieces alongside more contemporary compositions.

The concert featured works by Josef Tal, and that Tal may not be that familiar to ‘Western’ classical music audiences, prompted Esfahani to share his expertise, and introduce us to not just Tal, but five further composers from the region who we really ought to know more about.

I’ve been on something of a Josef Tal ‘kick’ lately. After all, I performed his Concerto for harpsichord and tape at the Southbank Centre in April 2023, and in the couple of years leading up to that I’d been familiarising myself with his symphonies. Born in Germany, Josef Tal — then Josef Grünthal — came to the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and, along with figures such as Paul Ben-Haim and Haim Alexander, effectively created an Israeli school of new music that drew on the styles and genres of the region as much as it did on the European formation of the early Zionist settlers.

I find the meeting of cultures in this compositional school totally intoxicating, and I am at a loss as to why we don’t hear this music more often. In autumn 2022 I finally found a set of all of Tal’s symphonies, and I constantly come back to the second one, written in 1960. I wrote down what I thought was its main tone-row, however that piece of paper resides under a pile of books somewhere…

If anyone represents the positive trend of women’s voices coming to dominate Iranian artistic expression since the catastrophe of the 1979 revolution, it is Anahita Abbasi; one of a good many Iranian female composers to make their mark on the international scene.

I suppose I should state my outright bias here, as I consider Anahita to basically be the sister I never had… and I commissioned the 2018 work ‘Intertwined Distances’ from her, a work that I’ve since performed all over the world. Here it is, at its premiere, in Madrid.

Turkey has had a long tradition of composers who’ve occupied the space between different cultures and traditions, indeed a number of late Ottoman sultans were quite distinguished and active composers in their own right. But I believe a good introduction to the presence of Turkish composers in what we still call ‘classical’ music is the doyen of their 20th century composers, the eminent Ahmet Adnan Saygun.

His concerto for cello and orchestra, op. 74, is a rather late work which distils so much of the composer’s special affinity for this particular instrument. It is in some ways, given its 1987 date of composition, rather conservative. But it gives a rather good sense of why Saygun has been described as the Bartok of Turkey.

Now, many of you might think the Republic of Azerbaijan doesn’t really fit into the Middle East. But for various cultural and historical reasons – and no, not just because they used to be part of the Persian Empire – I think the idea of the country as sharing in the experience of the region totally fits.

I had the honour of meeting Frangiz Ali-Zadeh, whilst visiting the Composers’ Union – of which she is chair, and the first woman in that position – on a trip to Baku. She’s been largely at the forefront of a lot of musical change in Azerbaijan and the former Soviet Union, performing much proscribed music in her youth, such as the first performance in the USSR of Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis.

Ali-Zadeh’s best known work to those of us in the West, is ‘Mugam Sayagi’, a piece for quartet with percussion and magnetic tape that was first recorded by the legendary Kronos Quartet in the early 1990s. Here it is being performed by the young Armida Quartet from Germany.

Like Abbasi, Samir Odeh-Tamini — who lives in Berlin and has been a great source of support to younger performers and composers including myself — is a personal friend and I look up to him for both the uncompromising nature of his aesthetic vision and the tremendous level of technique he brings to everything he touches. I cannot praise him enough and if there’s one person from the Middle East in Berlin who is doing actual innovative and sincere work in bringing cultures together, I believe it’s him.

I’m sure he’d want me to feature another work of his, but my favourite Odeh-Tamimi piece is 2015’s Mannsur, a powerful work for four mixed choirs, brass, and percussion, performed here by the ensembles of the Bavarian Radio.

The multi-faceted Zad Moultaka is a figure who really deserves his own category. He first gave expression to his creativity in the world of contemporary theatre, and has an equally significant presence as a visual artist, particularly as a photographer and painter.

At first I thought of posting a recording of his ‘La Passion selon Marie’ (and you really should go and find a recording of it!), but I think the most striking introduction to his work is 2008’s ‘Calvario’. It’s a piece for guitar, an instrument for which he has a great affinity and which is beautifully performed here.