Music that has been handed down from mouth to mouth over two millennia and which still blossoms and evolves today created a heady mix in the latest of the Utzon Music series when five Iranian musicians took the audience on a “timeless journey”.

The 90-minute concert featured three Australian based Iranian musicians alongside two Persian classical music stars, singer Saba Pashaee and oud player and composer Hamid Khansari, who both flew in from Tehran for a program which comprised instrumental and vocal songs in the radif tradition alongside lengthy improvised solos.

Timeless: Hamid Khansari and Saba Pashaee. Photo © Ravyna Jassani

Traditional Iranian instruments were arrayed on the stage. The qanun, a plucked dulcimer with more than 70 strings and mandals or levers which vary the pitch microtonally up or down, played by Vahideh Eisaie, is the “piano” of the band.

Pegah Kheirdoush, alternating between a bowed lute (ghaychak) and a Middle Eastern fiddle (kamancheh), provided the string section and Sohrab Kolahdooz completed the line-up with a large variety of drums and shakers, some of them wired for sound effects.