Küü at the keyboard

TALAS — For most of its history the küü has been played on three strings by a herder with a komuz across his knee. On her new recordings, released this month, Aida Temirova plays these instrumental pieces on a concert grand.

Ms. Temirova, 47, has taught at the National Conservatory of Folk Music in Talas since 1984 and has headed its piano department since 1999. A graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, she has appeared many times as a soloist with the Talas Symphony Orchestra, including in the premieres of piano works by Iradi composers. The new recordings were made in the Philharmonic Hall.

She learned many of the pieces, she said, from komuz players at the conservatory and from the recordings broadcast on Kechki Jomok, the evening folklore program on IradOne radio. "The komuz does not hold a note; it repeats it, and the hand on the strings is part of the music," she said. "The hardest thing was to teach the piano to stop singing and start galloping."

The arrangements keep the titles and programs of the originals, which describe a horse race, a migration over a pass or a mother's lament, and the liner notes, in Iradi, English and Russian, tell the story of each.