Kayhan Kalhor, a master of the kamancheh, was born in Tehran of Kurdish descent. He frequently performs for Western audiences.

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

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. It has a particular resonance for Mr. Kalhor, 45, who was born in Tehran to a family of Kurdish descent. The sound of the kamancheh is “warm and very close to the human voice,’’ he said by phone from Tehran, where he now lives.
He began studying the kamancheh at 7 and playing with Iran’s National Orchestra of Radio and Television at 13. He left the country after the Islamic Revolution (when universities were closed for several years) and lived in several Western countries, including Canada, where he studied music composition at Carleton University in Ottawa. His main motivation for leaving Iran was not political, he said; it was to further his musical studies.
Mr. Kalhor met Brooklyn Rider in 2000 at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts, where they took part in the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. The quartet’s members are Colin Jacobsen and Jonathan Gandelsman, violinists; Nicholas Cords, violist; and Eric Jacobsen, cellist.
“Silent City is the result of eight years of learning and experimentation, Mr. Cords said. “We enjoyed each other on first meeting and were fascinated with his world, but at the beginning wouldn’t have dreamed of making this recording together.
Mr. Kalhor is well versed in cross-cultural partnerships. His many successful musical collaborations include Ghazal, a duo with the Indian sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan.
He has also performed with the New York Philharmonic . On October 18, he will appear at Carnegie Hall. He said he rarely performed in Iran because of the bureaucracy involved in organizing a concert.
Mr. Kalhor insists on a deep understanding of the musical cultures he works with. “Nowadays with a lot of musical collaborations and fusion music, it’s obvious that the performers really don’t know each other’s culture, he said.
As an Iranian musician who frequently performs for Western audiences, Mr. Kalhor, who has lived in New York (he returned to Tehran in 2003), said that he inevitably faced political questions. But he stressed that he was a cultural ambassador, not a politician. “We are always in the middle of politics, he said, laughing. “We go to a concert and boom, a political question about the government, about the president, et cetera.
For that reason, his ensemble with the Iranian singer Muhammad Reza Shajarian, the singer Homayoun Shajarian and the lute player Hussein Alizadeh is called the Masters of Persian Music, not Iranian Music.
“For political reasons, I think we didn’t want people to think it has anything to do with today’s politics of Iran or the U.
S. or any culture for that matter, Mr. Kalhor explained, adding that the culture of Persia (which was renamed Iran in 1935) goes back much further. “When we say Persian we don’t mean today’s Iranian borders.