A musical and cultural tour through the lands of the Caucasus

It's time once again to break the ice.

The Seattle Chamber Players, internationally known for their venturesome programming, will present their third biennial Icebreaker Festival this coming weekend in Benaroya Hall. This year's focus is music of the Caucasus, forging what founding director Paul Taub calls "a new path through the Silk Road."

They're hoping to break more than just the artistic ice, with composers and musicologists visiting from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Turkey. Maybe a little personal ice will be broken as well, since several of these countries have either past or recent histories of political enmity.

"We know that the musicians will speak together and work together," says Taub. "I think we really will do some icebreaking on that front."

The first festival, "Voices of a New Russia," brought nearly two dozen composers and musicians from Russia to participate in 2002. Two years later, the second Icebreaker, called "Baltic Voices," featured nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea. That festival received an enthusiastic review in The New York Times last April by the noted musicologist Richard Taruskin.

For 2006, Taub and the festival's artistic adviser, Elena Dubinets, have put together programming that includes music very rarely heard in this country, by at least four living composers from each of the five Caucasian countries in the festival. Among them: the highly regarded Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (Azerbaijan), whose newly commissioned work, "Atesh" (Fire), will be premiered by the Seattle Chamber Players; Tigran Mansurian (Armenia), Josef Bardanashvili (Georgia), Kamran Ince (Turkey), and Iranian composers Alireza Mashayekhi, Reza Vali, Mohammad Ansari and Ramin Heydarbeygi.

Festival fans also will hear Persian ney (a type of flute) player Hossein Omoumi and watch the Anadolu Turkish Folk Dancers.

"The majority of the composers in Icebreaker III are not known outside their region," says Dubinets, whose exhaustive research lined up many contacts.

Getting everyone together hasn't been easy; there have been "enormous visa problems," as Taub puts it. Communications aren't a snap, either, when you have a group of musicians who use several alphabets.

"It's specifically theirs," says Taub of each country's music. "We wanted to bring in underrepresented cultures with one foot in the door of classical music."

"They don't want to be like the West," Dubinets adds of the composers and performers, "they just want to be themselves. They are highly educated, and they have wonderful traditions."

The Seattle Chamber Players are hoping the local immigrant communities will show up to hear their home countries' music. Seattle has sizable Turkish, Iranian, Azerbaijani and Armenian communities, and a smaller Georgian community. Those communities have already shown support for the festival. Public funding has come from the City of Seattle, King County and Washington State; foundation grants from the Paul Allen Foundation, Siemens Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Argosy Foundation of Boston. In all, the budget for Icebreaker III is around $60,000.

In addition to performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 7 p.m. next Sunday in the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, there will be 15 seminars and other presentations on the music of each of the five countries in Soundbridge (the educational center in the northwest corner of Benaroya Hall's street level). Pre-concert events will include such rarities as a seven-string guitarist playing new Georgian music.

Among the guest performers: soprano Elizabeth Keusch, pianist Ivan Sokolov and conductor Christian Knapp, with ten Seattle musicians from the Seattle Symphony and other top groups. The core members of the Seattle Chamber Players are Taub (flute), Laura DeLuca (clarinet), Mikhail Shmidt (violin) and David Sabee (cello).

"In the past, we have gotten a lot of people interested in world culture and students," Taub says.

"Don't expect to hear Western classical music!" says Dubinets. "This is music that is bright and colorful in instrumentation and harmony, full of the richness and drama of the cultures. It has been very hard to select the works we will feature from so many. It has taken us more than a year."

The international contacts they've been making in these Icebreaker festivals have worked both ways. The Seattle Chamber Players have been invited to several overseas festivals, including some in Warsaw and in Italy. Taub says he has been delighted to see each festival build more relationships: " 'Icebreaker' is not just an empty term."

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com