Camille El Bacha & Naghib Shanbehzadeh

Camille El Bacha (France/Lebanon) and Naghib Shanbehzadeh (Iran) form a rare and incandescent duo that makes musical traditions meet without ever eclipsing one another. Their creation gives rise to a music that is at once learned and instinctive, meditative and vibrant, carried by the deep breath of a piano shaped by Bach, Ravel and Reich, and by the spellbinding pulsations of the zarb and the dohola – Iranian percussion instruments with raw, organic textures. What unfolds on stage is an intense conversation, a sensitive encounter between two musical languages: one rooted in the conservatoire, the other passed down orally through generations. The piano – at times pared down, at others richly abundant – unfurls a sonic architecture upon which Naghib’s virtuosic rhythms weave lines of tension, grace and vertigo. This duo does more than fuse East and West: it invents a new musical territory. An immersive, hypnotic experience in which time seems suspended, carried by living, ever-shifting music that speaks as much to the ear as to the soul.