Maryam Akhondy

Maryam Akhondy ( born 1957 in Tehran, Iran) is a Cologne-based Iranian singer and musician.

Life

As a student she won her first singing competitions. While studying drama at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tehran, she took singing lessons with Ostad Nasrollah Wet Pour, one of the most important teacher of classical Persian singing, learned from him radif, the orderly and systematic Persian music, and Tahrir, the characteristic vocal technique in the traditional Iranian art music.

After the Islamic Revolution of public appearances by singers in Iran were banned. Therefore Maryam Akhondy emigrated to Germany. In Cologne they ventured an artistic new beginning and gave his first concerts with exiled Iranian music groups in Scandinavia and other European countries.

As a singer and director of the "Ensemble Barbad ", a classical orchestra orchestrated Iranian art music, Maryam Akhondy stands on the stage of many German and international concert halls and music festivals since the mid- 1990s. In 2006, she set to music with this group poems of Persian poet Hafez, Khayyam and Attar and published them on the CD Sarmast - Iranian Art Music for the text of Persian Poets.

Maryam Akhondy is also founder and director of the women's vocal group Banu (Persian for " gentlewoman " ) with which she is investigating almost forgotten Iranian woman chants, to then edit and bring to the stage. Some of the collected workers, wedding and funeral songs can be found on Maryam Akhondys in 2000, published in CD Banu - Songs of Persian Women.

Maryam Akhondys musical work also includes the study of temporally distant past eras of Persian music, including a concert project with Zoroastrian sounds and songs from pre-Islamic times, the 2012 Festival Musica Sacra International in the City Palace to Füssen ( Germany ) under the title "Music In Praise of Ahura Mazda " was premiered.

About the Persian music beyond labor Maryam Akhondy also repeatedly with representatives of Western music together from 1994 to 1999, for example with the German world music orchestra Schälsick Brass Band, 2008 with the Cologne arranger and bandleader Mike Herting at the Ruhr Triennale in Duisburg and 2009 with the American jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin at the European premiere of his opera project " Bobble" in Basel / CH.