In “Silent City,” a hypnotic work commemorating Halabjah, a Kurdish village annihilated by Saddam Hussein, the kamancheh, an upright four-stringed Persian fiddle, breaks out in a lamenting wail based on a traditional Turkish melody. “Silent City” is included on a new disc of the same name on the World Village label, which Kayhan Kalhor, a virtuoso kamancheh player, recorded with the young string quartet Brooklyn Rider. The work opens with a desolate murmuring improvised by the strings, eerily evoking the swirling dust of barren ruins, with a Kurdish melody heralding the rebuilding of the destroyed village
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