Dialogues with the Tar

The tar (lute) and kamancheh (spike fiddle) are both originally Persian instruments, but talking to musicians in the region, it’s often the Azeri players that are the most admired. Among them are the tar player Ramiz Guliyev and kamancheh – or kamancha as it is styled in Azerbaijan – player Habil Aliev. The Azeri tar was developed into a more powerful 11-string instrument, compared to the five-string Persian one, at the end of the 19th century by a player called Sadygjan, making it a perfect solo instrument.

Ramiz Guliyev is currently Azerbaijan’s leading tar player, and was apparently dubbed ‘the Paganini of the East by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. This disc includes five traditional solo pieces in different mugham (modes), which give a good idea of the particular characters they have – I particularly like the melancholy ‘Mugham Humayun’. It also includes five showy concert numbers for tar and orchestra, a product of the Soviet period and their preoccupation in bringing traditional music into the conservatoires and onto the concert stage. The most exuberant is simply called ‘Concert Piece’, by Adil Babirov, a pupil of Shostakovich. There’s also just one movement from the ‘Concerto No 1 for Tar and Orchestra’ by Hadji Khanmammadov (1918-2005), who pioneered the tar concerto as a genre and composed five of them. It seems a little odd just to extract the slow movement, which really does sound like a fragment and doesn’t stand on its own in the way the slow movement of, say, Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ can do. Still, this is a remarkable disc of unusual repertoire played by a master musician.