Karagüneş & Marco Nervegna: Santur, Sitar, and Oud in Dialogue

November 22 brought another full evening to our home concert space in Faenza — this time a duo concert with Marco Nervegna, whose mastery of both sitar and oud allowed us to trace a sonic line from Anatolia through Persia and into the Indian subcontinent.

Thirteen people came. Fifty-three more had been thinking about it. The room was small enough to feel intimate, large enough to hold the sound properly. And the format, by now, had become familiar: early afternoon gathering for families and children at 17:00, dinner at 19:00, concert at 20:30, and a jam session at 21:30 for anyone who wanted to stay and play.

The Program: Iranian Santur Meets Indian Sitar

The evening’s lineup was intentionally minimal:

• Özgür Yalçın — Iranian santur, guitar, percussion, vocals
• Marco Nervegna — sitar, oud

Marco’s background in Indian classical music runs deep. He began studying sitar in 1998 with Gianni Ricchizzi, traveled to Benares multiple times to study with masters including Raj Bhan Singh and Dr. Amar Nath Mishra, and earned a degree in non-European musical traditions with a focus on Indology. He also studied Turkish maqam and oud with Peppe Frana and Yurdal Tokcan, giving him fluency in both the melodic world of raga and the modal framework of Middle Eastern music.

What made the evening work was not virtuosity for its own sake but the willingness to listen. When Marco played sitar, the santur responded not by imitating but by finding its own voice within the same tonal space. When he switched to oud, the texture shifted entirely — the plucked resonance of the oud against the hammered shimmer of the santur created a conversation that felt centuries old and entirely immediate at the same time.

Dinner as Part of the Evening

One thing that set these early Tapadum concerts apart was the refusal to separate music from hospitality. We did not want to run a venue. We wanted to create a space where people gathered, ate together, and then listened together.

That evening’s menu: red lentil soup, rice, roasted chicken with vegetables, and Greek salad. Nothing elaborate, but enough to turn the evening into something more than a performance. By the time the concert started, people had already been in the room for an hour or more. They were not strangers watching musicians. They were participants in a shared evening.

Marco Nervegna: A Brief Profile

Marco has been teaching sitar since 2007 and oud since 2012 at the Scuola di Musica Popolare in Forlimpopoli. He performs in the traditional Indian classical duo format — sitar accompanied by tabla — and has collaborated with musicians including Ciro Montanari, Alessandro Servadio, Fabio Chiari, and Nihar Mehta across the Italian world music scene.

His approach to both instruments is rooted in tradition but not bound by it. He studied dhrupad vocal music with Amelia Cuni and Ritwik Sanyal, deepening his understanding of the rhythmic and melodic structures that underpin North Indian classical music. And his work with Turkish oud has given him a second modal language to draw from, one that shares ancestry with the Persian and Arab maqam systems but has its own regional character.

The Jam Session

After the concert, we opened the floor for improvisation. A few local musicians stayed, and the session ran until late. By that point, the room had warmed up — both literally and musically — and the boundary between performer and audience had dissolved entirely.

This became the pattern for most of our concerts that fall and winter: structured performance followed by open improvisation. It kept the evenings alive. It gave people a reason to bring their instruments. And it turned each concert into something more than a one-way transmission.

Tapadum continues to host concerts and jam sessions in Faenza and Brisighella. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.