For Dutch-Iranian soprano Lilian Farahani, folk music feels like “the primal expression of sorrow, love, or joy, the most honest form of making music, and the purest form of singing. It is the beginning of all music.” In Nomad , she shows how people carry their stories and their homes with them on their journeys—like Scheherazade, who conjures up a different world night after night with her tales. From Ravel’s dreamy France around 1900, we travel via Dvořák’s Bohemian folk sounds and Reza Vali’s Persian songs to the Argentine tangos of Piazzolla and Ramírez and Weill’s imaginary island of Youkali. Music as memory, refuge, and new beginning.

Lilian Farahani - soprano
Maurice Lammerts van Bueren - piano