Fez — “L’Antidote” brought one of the most hypnotic performances of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music to Jnan Sbil on Friday evening, turning the garden into a space of tension, release, and mysticism.
The trio brings together Iranian percussionist Bijan Chemirani, Lebanese pianist Rami Khalifé (son of Macel Khalié), and Albanian cellist Redi Hasa, three musicians rooted in different Eastern traditions but united by a taste for risk, improvisation, and spiritual intensity. Their project is a virtuoso instrumental repertoire built as a healing response to the “poisons” and torments of the present world.
Their performance did not move in straight lines. It opened like an experiment, with each instrument searching, provoking, and answering the others. Khalifé’s piano shifted between classical force, Sufi echoes, and almost electronic pulses. Hasa’s cello carried deep, wounded tones, while Chemirani’s percussion pushed the whole arrangement into sharper states of rhythm and trance.
The result felt less like a concert than a living conversation. The musicians played with visible intensity, following each other from silence to eruption, from delicate phrases to almost feverish momentum. At several moments, the audience seemed pulled into a collective state of suspension, listening with the kind of stillness that comes when music reaches beyond technique.
Jnan Sbil helped shape that effect. The historic garden, created in the 19th century and now one of the rare green spaces in Fez’s old city, gave the performance a breathing atmosphere of trees, water, and evening light.
