TEHRAN -- Persian composer Mehdi Hosseini will perform his Baluchi concerto, utilizing folk music material from Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Provinces, at St. Petersburg’s House of Composers on June 11.

St. Petersburg-based American conductor Brad Cawyer along with musicians from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and Philharmonia will accompany Hosseini in the performance.
The concert offers further evidence that music provides an opportunity to broaden the audience’s perspective and create an atmosphere of awareness to the plight of others.
Georgy Firtich, director of the Association for Contemporary Music of St-Petersburg Composers Union has arranged the present season to foster a type of cultural understanding that stands as a marked contrast to that the Russian government.
Mehdi Hosseini was born in 1979, in Tehran, where he studied music theory, Persian music and composition with Farhad Fakhreddini. He later completed his bachelors and masters degrees in composition at Saint Petersburg State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, Russia.
There he studied composition with Alexander Mnatsakanian and afterwards took a postgraduate course with the composer Sergei Slonimsky and conducted research on Eastern music with Professor Tatiana Bershadskaya. Apart from his education in Russia, Hosseini has also been a student of the composer Nigel Osborne.
He has demonstrated his creative capabilities as a composer and his research abilities as an ethnomusicologist and theorist. Hosseini has written symphonic music and chamber orchestra pieces for ensembles and soloists in various compositional genres.
At its core, his music reflects his on-going research into the astonishing variety of Persian regional folk music and, in particular, the structure of Maqami music. His music achieves a subtle fusion of contemporary composition with ancient Persian musical traditions which can be heard in his Quartets that utilize folk material from Northern Khorasan and Bakhtiari, his Symphony of Monody that is based on Lorestan songs, and his 2008 concerto for string quartet and chamber orchestra that finds its source in the Maqams of southeastern region of Torbat-e Jam.