A Night of Daring Beauty: DakhaBrakha at the Weis Center
From the moment DakhaBrakha took the stage at the Weis Center, the air shifted. There was no need for words, no need for introductions—the setting itself, drenched in shadow and sound, was invitation enough. The audience sat in quiet anticipation, not yet standing, but utterly alert. It felt like the prologue to a myth—grand, majestic, yet deeply personal. You weren’t just watching a performance. You were being summoned into something larger.
DakhaBrakha didn’t play music. They conjured it.
Each piece unfolded like a self-contained story, rooted in folk tradition but alive with experimentation. Their voices layered over one another like waves, rising and breaking with force, tenderness, and everything in between. Every drumbeat, every note on the cello or accordion, felt intentional, urgent, and full of feeling. It was art without hesitation—fearless in concept, fearless in delivery. And the result was spellbinding.
There was no passive moment. Each member of the group was entirely present, an active participant in every shift of tone and pace. The performances were flawlessly synchronized, but not mechanical—they breathed, responded, evolved. You could see it in their faces, their movements, their energy: this was more than performance. It was offering. A ritual of sound and soul.
The audience, at first motionless, soon became something else entirely. As the night progressed, you could feel the tension rising—the collective heartbeat of a room being stirred awake. And when the final piece ended, the response was volcanic. People shot to their feet. The Weis Center was flooded with light—not from the stage, but from the audience itself. Phones lit up with flashlights, a sea of stars in a moment that felt both spontaneous and sacred. The applause was relentless. It didn’t fade. It crashed forward, again and again.
DakhaBrakha received not one standing ovation, but many. Every time it seemed like the clapping might settle, another wave would rise. Because how do you applaud something that breaks your expectations of what music can be? How do you thank artists who make you feel ancient and awake and weightless all at once?
And then, there was the art auction—a quiet but powerful reminder of the evening’s larger purpose. Three pieces were sold to benefit Ukraine, including one painting that went for $1,300. It was more than an interlude; it was a gesture of solidarity, a tangible extension of the spirit DakhaBrakha had conjured through song.
This was not just a concert. It was a reckoning with beauty, with identity, with resistance, with the unknown. DakhaBrakha reminded us that sound can hold pain and power in equal measure—that it can speak in the silence between languages, that it can carry you across time and place and still feel like home.
By the end, the clapping still had not stopped. And truthfully, it shouldn’t have.
Because nights like this don’t really end. They echo. They stay.
~Shaheryar Asghar, ’28