Lulian Ensemble Returns: Persian Classical Music with Darioush Madani
On 21 January 2023, the Lulian Ensemble returned to Tapadum in Faenza with an expanded quartet — Darioush Madani's tar and setar joined by voice, santur, and tombak in Persian classical music.
January 21 brought Lulian Ensemble back to Tapadum — this time with a new formation that added voice and a second melodic instrument to the ensemble’s sound.
Ten people came. Forty more had been thinking about it.
The Formation
- Darioush Madani — tar, setar, percussion
- Majid Akhundi — voice
- Mostafa Ahmadpanah — santur
- Arian Madani — tombak
The addition of Majid Akhundi‘s voice was the significant change from the ensemble’s previous Tapadum appearance. Iranian classical music has one of the most demanding vocal traditions in the world — the âvâz, the unmeasured vocal improvisation that sits at the heart of the Persian classical system, requires years of immersion in the radif, the vast repertoire of melodic material that defines the tradition. A skilled vocalist does not ornament the music. The vocalist is the music, with the instruments providing context and response.
Mostafa Ahmadpanah on santur brought a second melodic voice alongside Darioush Madani’s tar and setar. Two plucked and hammered instruments in the same Persian classical framework create a particular texture — the santur’s shimmer and the tar’s warmer, more vocal quality occupying adjacent registers, sometimes in unison, sometimes in counterpoint. Arian Madani on tombak provided the rhythmic foundation — the goblet drum that defines the pulse in Iranian classical music, its articulate surface strokes mapping the rhythmic cycles beneath the melodic improvisation above.
A Deepening Relationship
By January 2023, Darioush Madani had appeared at Tapadum three times — first leading the daf workshop in May 2021, then with the original Lulian Ensemble formation in June 2021, and now with this expanded quartet. Each appearance had gone deeper into the Persian classical tradition: from instrument technique, to ensemble performance, to the full combination of voice, melody, and rhythm that the tradition requires to be fully itself.
For the Tapadum audience that had followed this thread, January 21 was a point of arrival — the moment when the pieces they had been encountering separately came together in a complete musical statement.
After the Concert: Jam Session
The concert was followed by an open jam session — an invitation that required some courage in this context. Persian classical music is one of the most structurally specific traditions in the world. But the session was generous, as they tend to be at Tapadum, and the tombak and daf rhythms provided a foundation that other instruments could find their way into.
Tapadum hosts concerts and workshops from across the world. Explore our Persian 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.