Arashk Azizi’s Divine Sonata

“All hope abandon, ye who enter in.” With this chilling verse from Divine Comedy — first recited in English, then in Estonian by Kairit Kall — the Estonian premiere of Arashk Azizi’s Divine Sonata began at the Tallinn Fringe Festival on 5 September 2025, in the Estonian Theatre and Music Museum.

This was no ordinary recital. Candlelight, carefully chosen costumes, and the spoken word of Dante’s immortal poetry turned the performance into a ritual of music, literature, and theater. At its heart was the piano: Azizi’s own composition, born from the depths of Inferno, lifted through Purgatorio, and finally reaching the stillness of Paradiso.

Origins and history of the piece
Divine Sonata carries a history that deepened the resonance of its Tallinn performance. The work was commissioned by Ge.Ne.Ra for the Dante Festival 2024 in Ravenna, Italy, to mark the 703rd anniversary of the Supreme Poet’s death. Its world premiere on 26 September 2024 took place in the Basilica di San Francesco, only steps away from Dante’s tomb. That first performance had the weight of place and memory — a modern reimagining offered in the very city that guards Dante’s legacy.

The Tallinn concert, presented by Tunitemusic, marked the Estonian premiere of the sonata. Tunitemusic, an independent record label, supports musicians from across the world while also championing Estonian composers, ensuring that international voices resonate alongside the local. With this event, the label underscored its dual mission: to give platforms to global artists while strengthening Estonia’s vibrant contemporary classical scene.

Theatrical frame
Azizi performed each movement in costume — a red jacket and tie for Inferno, a dark blue jacket for Purgatorio, and a loose white shirt for Paradiso. These choices, though modest, served as visual markers of Dante’s journey. A single candle placed beside the piano flickered throughout, a small beacon of continuity. Before each movement, Kairit Kall’s recitations of Dante’s verses gave the audience a foothold in the poem’s language. Delivered plainly, without the trappings of staged acting, her words functioned as a threshold to each new soundscape.

Inferno
The sonata begins in conflict: a bitonal chord with a dissonant sound. Here Azizi sets light and darkness against one another. A chromatic fall introduces the main theme, which mutates through a series of variations. Each step intensifies, the music becoming heavier, more dissonant, more suffocating.

The rhythmic foundation is unstable: time signatures shift rapidly, hard to keep count. Echoes of Liszt, Rachmaninov, and Verdi’s Dies Irae inhabit the music’s grandeur and orchestral force, even though all sound comes from a single piano. Azizi attacked the keyboard with percussive clarity, his physical gestures magnifying the sense of descent.

Purgatorio
From here, the music enters a zone of instability. Purgatorio constantly evades tonal certainty. Harmony shifts unpredictably; rhythm fractures with syncopations, irregular meters, and sudden silences. The melodies leap and break apart, never climbing smoothly as they do in Paradiso, nor descending with infernal gravity. Instead, they stumble forward, restless, unresolved.

The audience heard a sonic reflection of the souls in Dante’s mountain: striving, longing, but not yet at peace. Arashk balanced fragility with sudden turbulence, drawing on Expressionism and even touches of Serialist language. The movement concluded not in darkness but in a fragile glimpse of the light to come.

Paradiso
A low note sounded alone, a root note in the void. Then, at last, the music bloomed fully, radiant and high on the keyboard. This is the key of fulfillment, the home long sought.

The final movement unfolded through several variations, each brighter, each lighter in texture. Harmonies grew transparent; lines ascended; textures opened into spacious clarity. At a crucial point, when epic clarity felt near, everything collapsed, and for a few seconds the theme from inferno came back. A reminder that Arashk’s paradiso, is not as beautiful and perfect as Dante’s, it contains an uncertainty, more than being a perfect world, it is a faint hope of a perfect world. But eventually the main theme of paradiso came back and calmness returned.

Arashk drew inspiration from minimalist restraint and from the spiritual purity of Arvo Pärt, an echo especially poignant in an Estonian premiere. Here the sonata stopped struggling, stopped explaining. It simply was.

The final cadence landed firmly and resolved the piece. Where Inferno shouted and Purgatorio wrestled, Paradiso rested in stillness.

Performance
Arashk Azizi’s presence at the piano was both musical and theatrical. His movements, never exaggerated, gave physical shape to the sonata’s architecture. His technique, particularly in the rapid shifts of Inferno and the fractured rhythms of Purgatorio, was precise and vigorous. Yet his greatest strength lay in restraint: in Paradiso, he trusted the audience with silence and softness, allowing each resonance to bloom naturally.

The evening’s design succeeded because it never overwhelmed the music. Costumes and candlelight framed the sonata but did not distract from it. Kall’s recitations, concise and direct, offered just enough text to ignite the imagination.

Final thoughts
The Tallinn performance of Divine Sonata offered a rare blend of historical depth and contemporary freshness. From its origin in Ravenna, beside Dante’s tomb, to its Estonian premiere under the banner of Tunitemusic, the work now carries a journey of its own: from Italy’s sacred spaces to Estonia’s adventurous Fringe stage.

Arashk’s sonata honors Dante without imitating him, distilling his epic into three movements of emotional essence. The result is a concert experience that feels both timeless and timely, classical and theatrical, local and international. By the end, what lingered was not merely music but the sensation of having traveled — from darkness to light — in the company of a poet and a piano.

Author: Anonymous

This reviewer prefers to withhold their name.