Textura
“Vali is obviously extremely well-served by the recording, and the listener, especially the one coming to his material for the first time, is rewarded by the stellar renditions the eight works receive from NAT 28, Carpe Diem String Quartet, and the others. Esfahân is tailor-made for anyone hungry for a heady fusion of Persian and Western classical forms.”
https://www.textura.org/archives/v/vali_esfahan.htm
Fanfare Magazine
Review by Colin Clarke & Interview by Marc Medwin
I enjoyed two previous releases of music by award-winning Iranian-American composer Reza Vali (b. 1952): a disc of Calligraphies on Albany (Fanfare 40:3) and a follow-up Albany disc in Fanfare 40:5. Another Naxos disc, which included Vali’s Flute Concerto, found its way into Raymond Tuttle’s 2004 Want List (he memorably described Vali’s music by inviting us to “imagine Khachaturian, without the agitprop”) ...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Composer Reza Vali will mark retirement with a pair of Persian music concerts at Carnegie Mellon
by JEREMY REYNOLDS
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov 2, 2022
The rhythms of Persian traditional music defy Western music notation. They’re intricate and complex and give the music a fluid sense of motion.
Persian music is also mostly improvised, or made up on the spot, according to stylistic rules.
“In a way it comes closest to jazz,” said Reza Vali, an Iranian-American composer who writes traditional and cross-cultural music for chamber ensembles and orchestras like the Pittsburgh Symphony. He has also been recorded widely, most recently at the Smithsonian Museum, and has also published books on Persian traditional music.
....
New York Times
"Whenever possible I spend a week of my summers at a chamber music course in Bennington, VT, swapping my critic’s pen for a violin bow. It’s a joyful experience — but humbling, too, as I struggle to match the sounds I produce to the ones I hear in concerts all year long. An embarrassingly large chunk of my coaching sessions are given over to tweaking the intonation of, say, Debussy’s String Quartet. So it was with awe and a pang of envy that I listened on Wednesday to the premiere of Reza Vali’s “Ormavi,” performed by the Carpe Diem String Quartet, whose members are here on the faculty.
The work takes its title from a 13th-century Persian music theorist and uses some of the ancient modes he codified. Where the Western scale is broken down into 12 equidistant steps, these modes are built from irregular intervals requiring the performers to internalize spaces that differ microscopically from the quarter tones sometimes called for in contemporary compositions. The resulting music was vibrant and richly expressive, with the quartet often acting as a single multihued instrument. Much of the music plays with — and slyly undermines — the concept of unison, with players tracing almost identical melodic contours or sustaining high pitches a hair’s-width apart. The resulting interference created washes of brilliant, throbbing color. Delicate pizzicato movements evoked the filigree wisps of Persian calligraphy.
The Carpe Diem players turned in a fiery and flexible performance that was astonishingly free given the unfamiliar tuning system. Here were four musicians who had thrown their hard-won concepts of Western intonation overboard in order to learn a new language to the point beyond fluency, where they communicated with eloquence and zest."
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times
The Pittsburgh Press
"Vali's String Quartet No. 2 is a bold, uncompromising emotional journey with motivic materials that undergo striking transformations…Every gesture in this dark, violent piece serves to advance the expressive content."
Donald Rosenberg, The Pittsburgh Press
Los Angeles Times
"Reza Vali's ear-opening 'Persian Folklore'…dominated the event, as a lion dominates a landscape of zebras. Urgent, cogent and tautly dramatic."
Review of Persian Folklore, Los Angeles Times
Christian Science Monitor
"Reza Vali's 'Seven Persian Folk Songs' ranged in mood from childlike simplicity to near terrifying force, in a highly successful blend of Western music with Vali's native Persian folk music."
Review of Seven Persian Folk Songs, Christian Science Monitor