Music, theater to unite in Shahnameh play

Iranian musicians and thespians have collaborated on a stage production featuring stories from Persian poet Ferdowsi’s epic masterpiece Shahnameh.

In a press conference at the Espinas Palace Hotel in the Iranian capital city of Tehran on Sunday, Playwright Naghmeh Samini said she is collaborating with organizers of the stage presentation ‘Si’ (meaning ‘30’ in Persian) in “a musical drama” that provides an atmosphere to link music and theater.

The project will feature some of Iran’s top musicians, such as vocalist Homayun Shajarian and composer and instrumentalist Sohram Purnazeri. The cast is composed of Shahr Dowlatshahi, Mehdi Pakdel and Amir Jadidi.

The project gets its title from the Shahnameh verse reading, “I toiled much over thirty years, by the Persian language I remade Iran,” referring to the belief that Ferdowsi spent 30 years writing Shahnameh over a millennium ago.

Completed in 1010, the Shahnameh is an epic Persian poem of nearly 60,000 verses by great Iranian literary master Ferdowsi.

“The Shahnameh was able to revive the Persian language during a critical and chaotic period of the history of Iran. And today, we are in a sensitive period, but we can still seek help from our national legends,” dramaturge Amir-Hossein Mahozi said.

Stories from SHahnameh which will be staged in the play include ‘Zal and Rudabeh’, ‘Rustam and Esfaniyar’ and ‘Rustam and Sohrab’.

The open-air performances will be directed under Ali-Asghar Dashti and will start in the courtyard of Tehran’s Sadabad Cultural-Historical Complex on August 6.

Purnazeri, who is the initiator of the project, said the performances will entail a fusion of regional and traditional Iranian music and Western classical music.

AI/AI