Additional Information
Canadian guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina will present his show RU’YA – رؤيا (clairvoyance or vision in Arabic) on November 2, 2025, at Sala Rossa in Montreal. The show is a co-production of Traquen’art and the Suoni per il popolo festival, and will also feature the premiere of Epigraphs by the excellent Montreal-based percussionist and composer John Hollenbeck for two voices (Jeanne Laforest and Sarah Rossy), guitar (Roman Munoz), and percussion (Hollenbeck himself).
For RU’YA, Grdina, a guitarist, long accustomed to avant-garde music but later falling in love with the oud, called upon the enchanting, sometimes bewildering, voice of Ghalia Benali, in a journey at the crossroads of abstraction and expressive lyricism. To do so, he draws as much on contemporary atonal writing as on jazz avant-garde, Arab maqams and Persian classical music. In addition to Benali and himself, Grdina brings together musicians Elias Stemeseder on piano, Eylem Basaldi on violin, Hamin Honari on Persian percussion, and Christian Lillinger on drums in this project.
With all of that now established, what is RU’YA? What to expect? I spoke with the project’s initiator, Gordon Grdina.
