Morgenland Festival Osnabrück Premieres Kayhan Kalhor’s Double Concerto for Cello and Kamancheh

Kalhor will be joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in performing the concerto with the Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and conductor Alan Gilbert

For its 20th anniversary, Germany’s Morgenland Festival Osnabrück has commissioned a double concerto for cello, kamancheh, and orchestra from the Iranian virtuoso and composer Kayhan Kalhor.

Titled Venus in the Mirror, the double concerto was co-commissioned by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the University Musical Society. 

The work will open the 21st edition of the Morgenland Festival Osnabrück on June 29, 2025, at the OsnabrückHalle, with Kalhor and Yo-Yo Ma as soloists with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and its principal conductor Alan Gilbert. 

A traditional Persian bowed string instrument, the kamancheh is one of the world’s oldest bowed instruments and is widespread in Iran, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. As a renowned kamancheh virtuoso and setar player, Kalhor has played a major role in introducing Persian music to the international music scene. 

Kalhor has worked with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Brooklyn Rider Quartet and can be heard in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Youth without Youth.” He is also a founding member of the Silk Road Ensemble, where he worked with Ma for decades. 

“This concerto for cello, Kamancheh (Persian spiked fiddle) and orchestra is an ode to peace and a celebration of a 25-year friendship with Yo-Yo Ma,” said Kalhor. “The piece was written to instill a sense of calm during complicated times and to reflect on the beauty that lies hidden in the balance of what it means to be human.”

“Kayhan and I first met backstage at Carnegie Hall, more than twenty-five years ago, and we quickly became spiritual brothers,” Ma explained. “Perhaps it is in part because our musical lineages are intertwined: the kamancheh represents for me the cello’s great great great grandparent. And it reminds us of what the cello cannot do, giving us access to a pre-scalar musical reality that predates the compromise of equal temperament. 

“Hearing the bow in Kayhan’s hands draw infinite shades of vibrations, from nothing to the very beginnings of audible sound, puts us in touch with a realm of meaning and spiritual subtlety that we encounter far too infrequently today, that the compromises of modernity have made more and more difficult to access,” he continued. “I’m so excited that the audience at the Morgenland Festival has a chance share in our brotherhood, to hear how the universal resonance of Kayhan's sound can remind us that we are all part of the same species, that we all have to contend with living, loving, learning, and dying, and that music is our way to locate, communicate, and memorialize these states of being.”

The concerto will receive its world premiere two days earlier on June 27, 2025, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, featuring the same performers and orchestra. The program also includes Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.