A Woman on the Podium: Paniz Faryousefi and the Tehran Symphony Orchestra
Iranian conductor Paniz Faryousefi leads the Tehran Symphony Orchestra during a concert at Vahdat Hall in Tehran, Iran, 13 November 2025.
Something unusual happened in Tehran this week. On 12 and 13 November 2025, Iranian violinist and conductor Paniz Faryousefi stepped onto the podium at Vahdat (Unity) Hall and led the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. Iranian and international outlets describe this as the first time a woman has conducted the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, and the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that Iran’s national symphony has appeared in public under a woman’s direction.
The program carried the title “Land of Simorgh” or “Simorgh’s Abode” and ran under the auspices of the state-linked Rudaki Foundation. The concerts brought together contemporary pieces by the Iranian composers Golfam Khayam and Aftab Darvishi, Sibelius’s Impromptu for strings, a concerto with violinist Pedram Faryousefi, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” At the end of the evening, Faryousefi dedicated the performance to “the women and mothers of Iran,” and especially to her own mother. Representatives of the Rudaki Foundation then presented plaques to her and to the two featured composers.
Faryousefi did not appear out of nowhere. She stands at the center of Iran’s classical music scene and has done so for years. She trained at the Tehran Music Conservatory and later at the Komitas State Conservatory in Yerevan. She serves as concertmaster of the Tehran Philharmonic Orchestra and founded the Novak String Quartet, which she continues to lead. Her work has taken her beyond Iran as well. She has appeared as a guest violinist with several ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic. In recent interviews she has spoken of this engagement with the Tehran Symphony as a sign that institutions in Iran are willing to trust women in classical music with real responsibility. She has also repeated a simple conviction: “Art belongs to humanity, not to men and women.” At the same time, she notes that many listeners in Iran still experience a woman on the podium as something strange.
Headlines that call her the “first” woman to conduct a symphony in the Islamic Republic only tell part of the story. Reporting from outlets such as Iran International and The World has reminded readers that other Iranian women have stood in front of orchestras over the past decade. Nazanin Aghakhani conducted the Tehran Youth Orchestra in 2014. Nezhat Amiri led a large ensemble in Tehran in 2018. Faryousefi’s “first” concerns the Tehran Symphony Orchestra specifically and the symbolic weight that comes with its status as the official national symphony.
For many observers, this week’s concerts signal a narrow opening in a cultural field that remains tightly supervised. Commentators at Iran International link Faryousefi’s appearance to the unsettled landscape that followed the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Gendered restrictions and hijab regulations remain in place. Enforcement varies from one neighborhood to another and from one week to the next. Cultural officials occasionally permit symbolic gestures that present an image of moderation without clear evidence of deeper reform. Faryousefi’s hope that she might “pave the way” for other women musicians sits inside this tension.
That tension does not erase the significance of what happened at Vahdat Hall. For many girls and young women in Iran who study violin or piano or voice, the sight of a woman conducting the national symphony changes the range of what feels imaginable. For parents in the audience, it may have reshaped quiet assumptions about who belongs in positions of artistic authority. For the musicians on stage, it meant working under a leader whose biography mirrors their own, everyday experience.
At the same time, the event invites harder questions. How far are cultural institutions in Iran prepared to go in supporting women’s artistic work beyond occasional high-profile appearances? What protections exist for women who challenge the boundaries of acceptable performance practice or dress? How long will legal and administrative structures continue to treat women’s full participation in public life as a problem to be managed?
These questions do not carry easy answers. Faryousefi’s concerts cannot shoulder the burden of solving them. They do something different. They mark a concrete moment in which women’s presence in Iranian classical music became more visible, and that visibility unfolded on the stage of the country’s most prominent concert hall. The image of a woman leading the Tehran Symphony Orchestra will not disappear quickly. It will circulate in news reports, in social media posts, in personal memories. Out of that circulation, new conversations will grow about who makes art in Iran, who gets to decide, and what a more just cultural order might require.
