Soheil Shirangi and Shervin Abbasi

Delarue, New York Music Daily

Tehran-based composers Soheil Shirangi and Shervin Abbasi have released an aptly titled haunting new album, Maelstrom. The two draw on influences from European minimalism and traditional Iranian sounds. It’s a diverse but dark collection of works for solo instruments and small ensembles. In a year of one horror after another, especially in Iran, this is indelibly an album for our time. Yet the music here also offers considerable hope and even devious humor.

The first work is Trauma, a Shirangi trio composition played by cellists Ella Bokor and Mircea Marian with accordionist Fernando Mihalache. The strings enter with a syncopated, mutedly shamanic drive that quickly rises to an insistent pedal point. The accordion first serves as a wary chordal anchor while the cellos diverge, return with an increasingly stricken intensity, and then wind out with plaintive washes.

Violinist Mykola Havyuk, clarinetist Yaroslav Zhovnirych, and pianist Nataliya Martynova play Abbasi’s The Rebellion, beginning with more hauntingly microtonal austere resonance punctuated by simple, forlorn piano incisions. Eerie, circling chromatics from the piano underscore troubled, anthemic phrases. A couple of vigorous flicks under the lid signal a wounded call-and-response: slowly but resolutely, a revolution flickers and eventually leaps from the desolation. The obvious comparison is the livelier moments in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

It’s the most distinctly Iranian piece here. By contrast, To Lose Hope, another Abbasi piece featuring clarinetist Mykola Havyuk and a string quartet comprising violinists Marko Komonko and Petro Titiaiev, violist Ustym Zhuk and cellist Denys Lytvynenko, first takes shape as a hazy cavatina, Havyuk’s crystalline leads balanced by brooding cello and shivery vibrato from the rest of the strings. The jauntiness, acerbity, and suspense that follow are unexpectedly welcome. The point seems to be that hope is where you find it.

Afrooch, an Abbasi solo work played by violinist Farmehr Beyglou, requires daunting extended technique, shifting back and forth between ghostly harmonics, moody atmosphere, insistently hammering riffs, shivery crescendos, and a call-and-response that grows from enigmatic to puckish.

The closing composition, Shirangi’s solo piano work, is played by Sahel Abaei, whose low murk contrasts with muted inside-the-piano gestures, expanding with spacious minimalist accents and eventually forlorn, Messiaenic bell-tone chords. If this is characteristic of the new music coming out of Iran, the world needs to hear more of it.