David Dalle
Thursday January 16th, 2020 with David Dalle
Iranian grief and rage with Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Mohammad Reza Lotfi. Mournful and beautiful strings from 12 Ensemble. Rush.

The awful downing of Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752, shot down by Iranian air defense shortly after take-off in Tehran and headed for Canada, has been a real blow for all Canadians and for the large Persian-Canadian community, with the majority of the dead being Persian-Canadians and young Iranians studying at Canadian universities. This has also caused enormous anger among the Iranian populace. Particularly galling because Iran has had a long-standing grievance against the US because of the American military downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 which was shot down by the the US navy while it was following its routine route over Iranian air space. The Iranian government had kept the memory of that tragedy alive and prominent, so every Iranian was very familiar with this horrible event, and to now have the Iranian military do almost the exact same thing is just intolerable. With all this in mind, today we will hear two of Iran's greatest musicians, Mohammed Reza Shajarian and Mohammad Reza Lotfi, in their most famous collaboration, a live recording from March 4th, 1981. The revolution was still very young then, and the new revolutionary government was pressing hard on the populace. That day in March, there were large demonstrations at the university in Tehran and clashes between revolutionaries and students. Many students and faculty were arrested, including Mr. Lotfi, who was the head of the school of music. He was detained for a few hours and was late arriving for the concert being held a the German Cultural Center--a concert to introduce Persian classical music to affiliates of the cultural center. Lotfi was distressed and angry and this carried into the performance. Shajarian had chosen a poem of Hafez, but due to the upheaval and agitated context that evening, it was clear that they "performed as though reciting thousands of years of frustrations and deprivations of a peace loving people". This show is dedicated to the 176 crew and passengers killed in flight PS752.