The man who made the violin cry: Who is Farid Farjad?

The musician of Persian origin, who started playing the violin at the age of 8, was born in Tehran in 1938. Farjad, who completed his master's degree in classical music at the Tehran Conservatory of Music in 1966, took on important duties in the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. The violinist, who has experience in Persian Folk Music, also worked on Western Classical music, and these studies played an important role in the development of Persian music.

The violinist, who was born and raised during the Pahlavi Dynasty, had to leave his country and settle in the United States of America due to the revolution that took place in Iran in 1979. Since this year, he has become a US citizen and started to live in the USA. However, he describes himself as Iranian, not American. After the revolution, when music was declared 'haram' and banned in Iran, Farjad and many Persian musicians were banned from entering the country. The artist has been living in Los Angeles for years.

In an interview, he stated that being exiled from his country changed his world of emotions more than its impact on the development of his music, and said the following;

“I was already one of the prominent violinists in my country before I left Iran. I was the violin virtuoso of the Iranian Symphony Orchestra. I had completed my education and was taking firm steps forward in this field. After my exile, there was no concrete change in what I learned and did. Being outside my country only changed my emotions, my inner world, my feelings. I was sympathetic to Western music in Iran of that period, which was on its way to becoming modern. While I was in Iran, I was more interested in the music and pieces of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven. However, after I was exiled, I started working more on Iranian music.”

Stating that his source of inspiration is the music he grew up listening to in Iran, Farjad adds that he used to listen to all the world's music, but now he only goes back and listens to his own albums and tries to find the deficiencies and mistakes in his old songs and make better music based on them.

Farjad's five-series album 'Anroozha' (Those Days), which consists of pieces he plays only with piano accompaniment, tells about the days when he was not banned from entering his country, his life there, and his longing for his country. In the first four of the series, Farjad was accompanied by Abdi Yamini, and in the fifth album, his wife Mitra Tavakkoli accompanied him on the piano.

Additionally, two collective albums called 'Golha Orchestra' are among the artist's works. In these albums, Farjad, in his own words, put the sadness in nature into notes.