Announcing the release of Girl, the debut portrait album of Soosan Lolavar featuring the ensemble Ruthless Jabiru, conductor Kelly Lovelady and soloists Sarah Saviet, Faraz Eshghi Sahraei and Roxanna Albayati and released on the Nonclassical label.

The album opens with ‘I am the Spring, You are the Earth’, for santoor and string orchestra; a work described by BBC Music Magazine as “a glorious, shifting collage of sound”, and chosen to represent the British delegation at the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) World Music Days Festival in South Africa in 2023.

The album follows with an orchestral expansion of Lolavar’s monody for detuned violin, ‘Undone’ (solo version commissioned by Riot Ensemble 2020). Initially written to express the feelings of life falling to pieces at the start of lockdown, this orchestral expansion maintains the original work’s unconventional tuning system, giving the piece a self-contained stability. This work was nominated for a prestigious Ivor’s classical award in 2024 in the category of best chamber ensemble piece.

Sextet ‘Girl’, is based on the Iranian folk melody ‘Dokhtare Boyer Ahmadi’, meaning ‘the girl from the town of Boyer Ahmadi’. All materials used in the work derive from this melody, but they are fractured and recontextualised: as such, ‘Girl’ explores folk melodies as collective memorialisation, warping, altering and re-imagining memories across time and space.

Originally commissioned by the Cantus Ensemble in Iran, ‘Tradition-Hybrid-Survival’ is inspired by shifting notions of identity. Lolavar’s orchestra shifts between groups labelled ‘local’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘outsiders’, with the cello charting a course between them: subverting, challenging, echoing or extending their materials.

Some press quotes on Girl:

Soosan’s music “sounds like nothing else on earth” (Gramophone)

“Lolavar’s music is a vector for the complexity of being: it is screaming, laughing, finding peace and sorrow at once” (The Quietus)

“The delicate balance between what’s written and what’s improvised gives this music a sense of infinitely-present unfurling; made anew in each new performance and each new listening” (Tom Service, BBC Radio 3)

“Rather than offering glib hybrids, Lolavar has created something that reflects her own dualties, a give-and-take of sensibilities and traditions that’s unique to her experience” (Peter Margasak, selected as one of best contemporary classical releases on Bandcamp, March 2024)

“Special notice this week goes to Girl, the new collection of fascinating, beautifully wrought pieces by British-Iranian composer Soosan Lolavar..It’s a knockdown debut, one I’m dipping into regularly even as I already want more” (Night After Night)