Farokhzad Layegh is an Iranian cardiologist and composer known for his innovative interpretations of classical Persian music. He was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1963 and began playing the violin at a young age. He later studied the Setar under the tutelage of renowned masters such as Hossein Alizadeh, Dariush Tali, Reza Ghassemi, and Massoud Shaari.

Layegh has released several notable works that garnered acclaim for their innovative approaches to Persian music. His debut work, “The Book of Austerity,” features modern Persian poetry set to classical Persian music, performed by traditional Persian instruments and vocals of Maestro Shahram Nazeri. His post-modern reinterpretation of Persian music for the string quartet, “Sus-septed Tempus,” was released in 2012 and has been performed internationally. In 2021, he released “Lexolalia Descenticum,” a conceptual album celebrating the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”

Layegh’s works have been critically acclaimed, with praise from Norman Lebrecht, a world-renowned classical music journalist, who described a performance of Sus-septed Tempus as “glorious sounds wondrously unifying.” Fritz de Jong in Het Parool calls the performance of The Waste Land (centered on Lexolalia Descenticum) as “A performance that you must experience. Physical, concrete, and emotional.” Gina Miroula describes it as “a crazy fusion of strings, choreography, and acrobatics,” in which “the composer Farokzad Layegh, draws parallels between Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) and Shamlou’s Terrestrial Verses (1970) with his compositions.”