The concert is sold out.
For more than eight years, the Oriental Music Academy Mannheim (OMM) offers artists from Turkey and the Middle East, Iraq, Iran and India a forum for meeting and developing (trans)cultural projects. The aim is to make the musicians visible in the society, and give them space for their work and networking. The second phase of this important project has now been initiated—the former refugee artists have become artists in residence. Syrian percussionist Firas Hassan, one of the artists in residence, will present his own MADD Ensemble. Hassan and his co-musicians have been in contact with OMM for years, and have toured the Arabic world as celebrated stars—before ending up in Germany after an odyssey. In this ensemble, with Jonathan Sell on bass, traditional music forms play as an important a role as contemporary ones. This is also the essence for Berlin-based Syrian flutist Mohamad Fityan’s new quartet, who are performing in the second part of the evening. With their modern instruments and the Nay und Kawala, traditional flutes, the musicians fuse oriental and western music and create completely new and surprising sound ambiences.
