Flute Links Arabic, Persian, Hindu Traditions

Performing music of other religions in a Protestant church is fraught with ironies that we don’t have the room to go into here. Yet Mystic Voices: Music of Devotion in Islam and Hinduism, at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church Tuesday night, was one of many such juxtapositions at the ongoing World Festival of Sacred Music, where cross-cultural concerts are the norm.

The point of this program, as conceived by soprano Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, was to emphasize the musical links between the Arabic and Persian Sufi traditions and those of the Hindu Bhakti tradition as personified by Lord Krishna, using the flute as a unifying thread. The theory worked like a charm, for the music of all three traditions was represented with soaring, highly ornamented, remarkably similar flute and vocal lines set over drones with complex rhythms on various hand drums.

Thus could the Ali Jihad Racy Ensemble’s joyful, lyrical, rhythmically percolating set of medleys of Arabic music at the beginning of the evening form an arch nearly four hours later with David Philipson’s peaceful, soulful North Indian improvisations on a bansuri (a bamboo alto flute) over a tanpura drone at the end. After intermission, Lakshmi Shankar, still in clear and expressive voice, forged more links between the Arabic/Persian groups and her Hindustani idiom. Occasionally the enlightened listener could perceive some perhaps unintended links--Manoochehr Sadeghi’s brilliantly articulated, gently nuanced playing of the santur, a 72-string Persian hammer dulcimer sounded a lot like Hungarian folk music, but that just added to the overall patina of unity among all cultures.

The one stylistic disconnection occurred when Catlin-Jairazbhoy lustrously sang selections from John Harbison’s “Mirabai Songs,” with its busy piano arpeggios and distinctly 20th century Western vocal line. Also, the packed, sweltering conditions of the church for hours on end demanded a good deal of sacrifice for art from the audience.