TEHRAN -- One of the giants of Iranian traditional music, Mohammadreza Lotfi, said in a bizarre remark that he is struggling to eliminate Iran’s prohibition on solo vocal performances by women.

Women singers are currently allowed to appear only in choral performances if the audience includes males. Solo performances by female singers are permitted only in concerts restricted to all-female audiences.
“I don’t recognize choral performances (for Iranian traditional music) at all,” conductor Lotfi said at a press conference held on April 19 to promote the concert series his bands Sheida, the Women’s Sheida, and the Sheida of Restoration are to perform at Tehran’s National Grand Hall from May 15 to 19.
“I also don’t believe in the segregation of men and women because I think that art is not just for only one gender,” he added.
“However, if Iran’s constitutional law and political system have prohibited women from solo vocal performances in public, despite my desire, I have to respect the law as an Iranian citizen,” he explained.
Commenting on how he believes his upcoming concerts would be improved if the ban were lifted, Lotfi noted, “Thus women will have a strong aesthetic presence in upcoming performances.
“It is unfair to use women as carriage wheels of men.”
Tar and setar virtuoso Lotfi, 61, reopened the Mirza Abdollah Music School and the Ava-ye Sheida Institute recording company in late 2006 when he returned home from the United States after 20 years.
Then he founded the Women’s Sheida, a band with women musicians and a male singer, and the Sheida of Restoration, a band which performs and records Lotfi’s rearrangements of Iranian traditional pieces.
Lotfi hoped to get a tremendous welcome from friends like Mohammadreza Shajarian, Hossein Alizadeh, and Parviz Meshkatian, with whom he had created several profound works in the Chavosh and Sheida bands during the 1970s. However, the dream didn’t come true.
Moreover, he was criticized by some of his former colleagues for improvisational performances during open-air concerts at Tehran’s Sadabad Palace last year.