Persian Gulf Music

Experience a breathtaking celebration of Persian Gulf music, pairing the spellbinding artistry of Iranian maestro Mohsen Sharifian with a magnificent 23-piece string ensemble in masterful works by acclaimed composers Kaveh Mirhosseini and Pouya Hamidi.

Mohsen Sharifian is a musician and researcher from southern Iran, born in 1975 in the port city of Bushehr. He began his artistic career in theatre in 1985 and started his professional musical activities in 1993 with the founding of the Lian Music Group, which is recognized as one of the most prominent and long-standing indigenous music ensembles in Iran. He has spent the last two decades immersing himself in the musical traditions of the Bushehr region, writing several books and collecting songs and dance-tunes and composing new works inspired by them. He is a virtuoso performer on the two ancient, emblematic instruments of the Persian Gulf region, the nay-anban (bagpipe) and the aay-jofti (double-pipe reed flute).

Kaveh Mirhosseini, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, is an Iranian composer, conductor, percussionist, and researcher of Iranian folk music. He founded the Tehran Cantus Ensemble, which performed and recorded more than 30 works by Iranian composers in Tehran. He also established MECA (Middle Eastern Composers Association) to collect an extensive archive of Middle Eastern composers, perform their works, and introduce a new diversity of compositional styles from the region.

Over the past decade and half, award-winning Iranian-Canadian composer, pianist, and sound engineer Pouya Hamidi has worked tirelessly to carve out his own unique expressive channel through Toronto’s musical landscape. An alumnus of The Taylor Academy, Pouya also co-founded the Ladom Ensemble, whose original music fuses Persian and Western classical traditions, blended with Argentine tango, Serbian folk dance, and progressive rock.

After the concert, enjoy a beverage and more music at the Postlude Performance in the Leslie &

Anna Dan Galleria.