|
Event
Van-Anh Vo and Mahsa Vahdat
Our Immigrant Voices series continues with
Van-Anh Vanessa Vo and Mahsa Vahdat
We are honored to be hosting this groundbreaking performance, as these virtuoso performers from Viet Nam and Iran collaborate for the first time! Each will perform solo, together and with Vanessa Vo's ensemble.
"Vo pushes the envelope of the past, engaging sounds and complex, multi-layered concepts to unfurl new spaces for the music she loves." Tom Huizenga, NPR
An award-winning performer and virtuoso on 16-string dan tranh (zither), voice and other traditional instruments, Van-Anh Vanessa Vo is also an Emmy Award-winning composer who has performed at Carnegie Hall, Zellerbach Hall, Lincoln Center, the Olympic Games Music Festival and more recently, with artists such as Terry Riley and Kronos Quartet. In this performance Vo and Vahdat will brilliantly fuse vibrant Vietnamese string and percussion instruments with haunting Persian influenced vocals. Vo and her ensemble will also take the audience on a journey to Vietnam through music and the culture behind it. Masterfully combining her traditional Vietnamese foundation with new structures and compositions, she was composer and arranger for the Oscar® nominated documentary Daughter from Danang.
"The Iran born singer Mahsa Vahdat has one of the most beautiful voices in the universe. So intense, so mystic, so passionate, it can express the deepest longing, sorrow and pain that exists." LIRA Magazine
Internationally beloved vocalist, Mahsa Vahdat is inspired by regional and traditional music from Iran, which she infuses with her unique and resilient artistic sensibility. Her song lyrics are mostly mystical and love poems by great Persian poets like Hafez, Rumi and Saadi, who lived several centuries ago, as well as works of contemporary Iranian poetry. Kronos Quartet's most recent album "Placeless", featuring Mahsa and her sister Marjan, has risen to the top of the World Music charts. She first attracted considerable worldwide attention with her work on the record "Lullabies from the Axis of Evil".
Mahsa was trained in classical Persian singing and regional folk music by master musicians in Iran. After Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, public female singing was banned.
To this day, female singers can only perform for authorized women-only audiences or alongside
a male voice, and can never perform solo in public. This situation has led to her award-winning work as an ambassador for Freemuse, an independent international organization advocating freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide.
|
|
 |
LocationSt. Cyprian's Church (View)
2097 Turk St (nr Masonic)
San Francisco, CA 94115
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
|
Contact
|
