Music in exile from Afghan Youth Orchestra closes Carnegie festival with poignance
The subtext of Carnegie Hall’s youth festival World Orchestra Week (WOW!), which wrapped Wednesday night with a rousing concert by the Afghan Youth Orchestra, has always been hope.
Hope that classical music–seemingly forever endangered by competing amusements, budget deficits, and an aging audience—will live on through the love and dedication of the young players whose skills have been wowing audiences all week. Hope that the matchless energy of young people can be channeled into enterprises that make the world a better place.
And in the case of these musicians from Afghanistan, hope that music itself will someday have a country to come home to.
In remarks from the stage, four teenage players and the director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) drew a picture of “a silent nation” under the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban regime, where not only Western symphonies and concertos but traditional ragas and folk music are proscribed.
They also described a society in which severe restrictions on girls and women are silencing the talents of half the population.
Today ANIM, founded in Afghanistan in 2010 by its current director Ahmad Sarmast, operates as a sort of conservatory-in-exile based in Portugal, sending its youth ensembles and its message of hope to concert halls worldwide.
Wednesday’s program began with what has become a WOW! custom, the young musicians entering down Carnegie’s two aisles, waving to the audience. In this case, the players kept going onto the stage and right out the stage doors, leaving the space free for the program’s first act: sitarists Shabana Gulestani and Gulalai Nooristani and tabla player Ahmad Emad Karimi—two women and a man, it should be noted—seated on rugs and performing ragas.
In “Rag Pilu” and the late-evening raga “Rag Bihag,” the sitars danced gently or meditated amid the shimmer of their sympathetic strings, while the tabla drummed out a metrically complex commentary, occasionally accelerating into a flurry of beats that sparked applause from the audience.
This music, with its strong influence from India, gave way to something more specifically Afghan: an ensemble of tabla and four rubabs, the robust-voiced Afghan lute, performing two Qawwali, or Sufi spiritual songs.
The first, “Tark-e Arezo Kardam” by Mohammad Hussain Sarahang, wove a hypnotic circling tune over the eager tabla. The ensemble expanded by another drum, sitar, and harmonium and seven male and female singers for the traditional song “Pir-e-mano,” whose enthusiastic playing, singing, and clapping put a hootenanny vibe under the words of the Sufi poet Rumi.
After intermission, the program shifted into Western symphonic mode, at least as far as instrumentation was concerned. Two young musicians introduced the all-female orchestra Zohra as “a symbol of freedom” and “a celebration of diversity for the future Afghanistan.”
Under the direction of conductor Tiago Moreira da Silva, the group of about two dozen young women performed “Zendagi” by Ahmad Zahir, building from a soft woodwind melody over light percussion through catchy rhythms to a full-throated finish.
The composer Nainawaz wrote “An Selsela Mo” in the 1950s to commemorate the liberation of Afghan women from wearing the obligatory hijab. Its theme-and-variations form allowed each section to shine in turn. The prominence of flutes, bells, xylophone and tambourine in the scoring established a kind of carousel-organ timbre that would come back again and again in this concert’s arrangements of Afghan tunes.
For “Sarzamine Man” by Amir Jan Saboori, the full complement of Western and Afghan instruments that makes up the Afghanistan Youth Orchestra came onstage at last, joined by a dozen players from another festival group, the European Union Youth Orchestra. Moreira da Silva led a performance that swung from delicate rubab and sitar solos over pizzicato to broad sweeping symphonic vistas. The hissing swell of cymbal crescendos added to the cinematic character of this and other pieces on the program.
Other highlights of the twelve short pieces on the concert’s second half included a spirited rendition of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, its Central Asian influence emphasized by casting the Afghan rubab in the role of the Hungarian cimbalom (dulcimer). The march-like Intermezzo from Kodaly’s Háry János Suite could have used more of the tempo freedom one heard in the Brahms, but gave horns and woodwind soloists opportunities to shine.
William Harvey’s Saudade do Afeganistão evoked, in a series of cinematic vignettes performed with passion and sweep, the coming of political darkness to Afghanistan, the flight of the musicians to Portugal, the hospitality of their adopted country, and their longing (saudade) for home.
An Afghan in New York, Moreira da Silva’s own composition inspired by the fish-out-of-water scenario of An American in Paris, found a lone rubab wandering among enigmatic sounds emanating from the percussion section, but also dancing along with the full orchestra in lively variations.
The program concluded with two arrangements of well-known Afghan songs, with conductor Moreira da Silva encouraging the audience to clap along with their tricky 7/8 Afghan meter. “Maste Mange Bar” featured some virtuoso picking on the rubab, while “Watan Ishq Tu Iftekharam”—originally a Greek song by Mikis Theodorakis, but adopted by Afghans as an unofficial national anthem after the fall of the Taliban in 2001–danced exuberantly through many variations, ranging from pianissimo to all-out fortissimo.
Unlike their young counterparts on other evenings of the WOW! festival, these players didn’t tackle any of the monumental Western symphonies that would have tested their sense of nuance and musical architecture. That didn’t matter–as a demonstration of courage and determination and love of music, this concert would be hard to top.
2 Responses to “Music in exile from Afghan Youth Orchestra closes Carnegie festival with poignance ”
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Posted Aug 09, 2024 at 12:07 pm by Amanullah Noori
Thank you so much Carnegie Hall and WOW festival!!
Posted Aug 17, 2024 at 2:24 pm by Anna
What an inspiring performance! The Afghan Youth Orchestra truly embodies the spirit of resilience and hope through their incredible music. Their journey from exile to the stage at Carnegie Hall is a testament to the power of art in uniting cultures and uplifting spirits. Bravo to these talented young musicians! ✨