Delâshena

This is an exquisite duo. Bijan Chemirani should be well known to Middle Eastern music enthusiasts as one of the amazing France-based Chemirani family, specialists in Iranian percussion. Shadi Fathi is lesser known; she was born in Tehran, but is now also resident in France. A pupil of the renowned Dariush Talai, she's an amazing player of setar and shourangiz, both of them long-necked lutes – the former sweetly delicate and the latter larger, with a deeper, more earthy sound. She knows how to make these instruments sing and how to get rhythmic vitality out of them, alongside Chemirani's incredible accompaniment on tombak (goblet drum) and daf (frame drum). Two of the tracks, the first and last, have poems spoken in Farsi, but it's the delicacy and articulation of the 12 instrumental tracks, composed by the two musicians, that stand out here. The drawback for Shadi Fathi, an all-too-rare female instrumentalist from Iran, is that this disc comes out at the same time as a similar, but more dramatic and better recorded one by Mehdi & Adib Rostami. Otherwise Delâshena would also be a Top of the World contender.