The Shahnameh Millennium Concert is coming to Toronto

History comes to Toronto next week as the city plays host to the first ever Persian Trilogy of Shahnameh concert based on the 1000-year-old national epic of Persia. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s member’s performance, under the direction of Maestro JoAnn Falletta will be held at Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday August 2, 2008. Falletta is the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the winner of the most prestigious conducting awards such as National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award for exceptionally gifted American conductors.

“The Shahnameh is a universal piece of art and through the Persian Trilogy I become more familiar with its virtue stories,” she said.

The Shahnameh was written in the 11^th century by the renowned Persian poet, Ferdowsi who took 30 years to write about 50,000 rhyming couplets, which were organized into two legendary and historical divisions.

The 78-minute concert is focused on three of the best-loved stories of the epic: “Seven Passages of Rostam,” about the main hero of the Shahnameh and his heroic seven stages fights to rescue Kavoos king from imprisonment, “The Seemorgh” the evocation of the myth bird who take Zal -Rostam’s father to high mountains and save him from death, and “The blood of Seyavash,” the tragedy death of the Persian prince.

Over 50 legendary Persian miniatures’ images from the past centuries have been taken from well known museums such as New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art to be projected on a giant screen during the concert. Additionally, the traditional way of scene-narrating (naqqali) by a master storyteller Morshed Valiollah Torabi is turning the concert as a multimedia event.

“The story telling, the poetry, the projection of images and the orchestra playing, together is a big task and a unique experience,” Falletta said.

The concert is part of the Seventh International Biennial Conference on Iranian studies, which will be held at Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel from July 31th to August 3th.

“This is the largest international gathering of about 200 scholars from all around the world who have been invited to present their current research on Iran,” said Mohamad Tavakoli-Taraghi, the conference program chair and a history professor at the University of Toronto.

According to him, most of the scholars were invited to the conference from Iran did not received a visa.

The four day conference will include public sessions and seminars on a variety of topics, including social, cultural and historical issues, a film festival-screening 25 feature and documentary films, and a book exhibition in addition to , the Persian Trilogy of Shahnameh concert.

The Persian Trilogy was composed by the prominent Iranian-American composer, Behzad Ranjbaran between 1989-2000 and is going to be presented in Toronto in celebration of the shahnameh’s 1000^th anniversary.

“It’s a special honour to present the whole three parts, for the first time together in a diverse cultural city like Toronto,” says Ranjbaran, “This is an opportunity to reveal classic Iranian art as part of much larger fabric of the Toronto multiculturalism.”