GERMAN ORCHESTRA TO MAKE RARE VISIT BY WESTERN MUSICIANS TO IRAN IN CULTURAL EXCHANGE
David McHugh

AP Worldstream
Published: Aug 26, 2007

A German symphony orchestra will play classics by Beethoven, Elgar
and Brahms in Iran this week _ a rare visit from a European ensemble
amid political tensions between the Islamic republic and the West.

The 60-member Osnabrueck Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Hermann
Baeumer, will arrive Monday and perform Wednesday and Thursday in
Tehran as the return half of an exchange that saw the Tehran Symphony
Orchestra perform to a packed hall last year in Osnabrueck.

The tensions between Iran and Western governments _ including Germany
_ have been over efforts to halt Tehran’s program to enrich uranium
and U.S. accusations that Iran supplies militants with training and
equipment to attack American forces in neighboring Iraq.

Michael Dreyer, head of the Morgenland, or Orient, Festival in
Osnabrueck that hosted the Iranians last year, said he hoped the
concerts would remain nonpolitical cultural events. "It’s a very small
step in improving relations between the people in the two countries,"
he said.

As required in Iran, the female German musicians will play in
headscarves _ as did the Iranian female musicians when they visited
Osnabrueck _ and the program was submitted to Iranian authorities
ahead of time.

The orchestra will perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Leonore Overture
No. 3; Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, and Johannes
Brahms’ Symphony No. 4.

Organizers are billing it as the first performance by a Western
symphony orchestra in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, a claim
officials at Iran’s culture ministry said they could not confirm.

News reports over the past several years indicate that the Armenian
Philharmonic Orchestra has performed in Tehran, along with an orchestra
from Ukraine and a chamber group from Waidhofen-Ybbs in Austria that
accompanied a trade delegation. A four-member group from Hamburg,
Germany specializing in contemporary music, ensemble Integrales,
has been there twice in recent years.

Nonetheless, a visit from a large-scale, highly professional Western
classical ensemble will be a landmark event, Tehran Symphony Orchestra
conductor Nader Mashayekhi said.

"For such a good orchestra, of such size, it’s the first time,"
he said.

"And what they’re playing is, I think, a very important point, because
it broadens the listening habits in Persia, because the Persian public
listens to classical music, but lighter classical music, not Brahms
Fourth," he said, using the old-fashioned term for Iran.

"Brahms Fourth is not light, or the Elgar Cello Concerto. It’s
something that is being presented for the first time to a Persian
audience."

Under the former monarchy, Western visitors included the Berlin
Philharmonic and its renowned conductor, Herbert von Karajan, who
played three concerts in November 1975 _ one of them just for the
shah and his guests, according to the orchestra’s archives.

Today, Western music and culture occupy an uncertain position. After
ousting the shah in 1979 and establishing an Islamic republic,
clerics outlawed all pre-revolutionary music.

Some hard-line clerics say music comes between the faithful, and God
and leads to impure thoughts, therefore being incompatible with the
Shiite school of Islam that rules Iran. Secular songs were banned as
un-Islamic, and in the early 1980s, police stopped cars to check tape
decks and smashed offending tapes.

In the 1990s, music gradually made a comeback in Iran under the then
reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. In December 2005, the hard-line
government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced a ban on Western
music on state radio and television.

But Western music and films banned by the state can be found on the
black market. Satellite dishes dot the capital’s rooftops, and a ban
on them is rarely enforced.

___

Associated Press writer Ali Akbar Dareini contributed to this report
from Tehran, Iran.