Liana Gourdjia / Matan Porat CHARLES IVES

Since I remember myself, there were sounds of violin and piano. I must have been present during hundreds of hours of scrupulous work, when my grandmother was teaching my sister the violin, long before being aware of what it all really meant. Music was all around me. My mother played the piano. Often the violin students of The Moscow Conservatory came to rehearse chez nous, and that is how I became familiar with every microscopic detail of most violin pieces she had accompanied. My mother loved accompanying, she made everyone feel confident, even in most treacherous passages. We knew she would always wait, or, in any case, do just the right thing in order to support a player. Masterful accompanists are hard to come by; they must be cherished. (Liana Gourdjia) 

Between 1902 and 1916, Charles Ives wrote sonatas for violin and piano referencing more and more frequently popular or religious melodies he heard in daily life, as if to better link serious music and the daily lives of Americans. A rare repertoire, championed by the sparkling Liana Gourdjia, who trained in Moscow, and later studied in Bloomington and Cleveland.

Varduhi Yeritsyan & Friends LETTERS FROM ARMENIA

A composer’s mother tongue is the first music he hears; it therefore determines the “genetic inheritance” of the musician’s sound world.  The link between a country’s music and its language seems, therefore, evident to me.  There is a clear relationship between the lyricism of Verdi’s music and the melodious character of Italian.  And does the acute sense of structure inherent to the Austro-German music of Beethoven, or Schoenberg, not reflect the language spoken by these two composers?  It is just as incontestable that Debussy’s chiaroscurist art is fundamentally linked to the ever-nuanced, veiled nature of the French language.

Armenian music is no exception to this rule.  It is as singular a construct as is Armenian, an orphaned Indo-European language born at the borders of Orient and Occident.  Like the national language, it is a synthesising language that unites opposing sources, Eastern and Western, folk and art.  If the melodic and even harmonic archetypes of Armenian music give a leading role to the augmented intervals and untempered scales characteristic of the Orient, the great Armenian musicians’ compositional art is thoroughly anchored in Occidental technique and know-how.

The founding father of Armenian art music was Komitas Vardapet.  Like Bartók, he was a great collector of folk melodies, which he first faithfully transcribed as he heard them, then arranged, harmonised and complexified them.  The folk song arrangements played on this recording, either by a solo piano or by small chamber groups, are therefore already at one step’s distance from the original folk model, which would be sung a cappella.  Several decades later, the other great figure of Armenian music, Aram Khachaturian, would use these folk-derived elements and add to them that great orchestral mastery so characteristic of many Soviet-trained composers.

Most of the folk songs set down by Komitas have touchingly simple texts that express nostalgia, or even melancholy.  Though humour and derision are important elements of Armenian culture, the ordeals the Armenian people have endured over the course of their lengthy history ensure that the expression of grief is a constant feature.

This recording is released in the centenary year of the 1915 genocide.  As this tragedy has never been recognised by those who perpetrated it, the Armenian people has never been able to engage in the necessary collective grieving process that must follow such a calamity.  On the contrary, the wait for an admission of responsibility from Armenia’s neighbor does nothing but revive national anger against an unacceptable case of historical revisionism.  But even in the darkest moments of its history, Armenia has always produced musicians and music.  The Armenians’ legendary optimism is an effective form of struggle against obscurantism.

The pieces in this recital may be animated, contemplative, tender, or solemn, but they are very rarely gloomy or woeful.  A sort of trust in the future characterises the “Armenian spirit”.  Music is synonymous with hope, it is a way of fighting against annihilation, a tool of resistance. As I contemplate my ancestors who vanished a century ago, I would like this recording to bear witness to the faith in justice that has never fled my native land.

Liana Gourdjia / Katia Skanavi STRAVINSKY

Since I remember myself, there were sounds of violin and piano. I must have been present during hundreds of hours of scrupulous work, when my grandmother was teaching my sister the violin, long before being aware of what it all really meant. Music was all around me. My mother played the piano. Often the violin students of The Moscow Conservatory came to rehearse chez nous, and that is how I became familiar with every microscopic detail of most violin pieces she had accompanied. My mother loved accompanying, she made everyone feel confident, even in most treacherous passages. We knew she would always wait, or, in any case, do just the right thing in order to support a player. Masterful accompanists are hard to come by; they must be cherished.

It was Spring of 1986 when I was taken to my sister’s violin lesson. At that time The Soviet Union was still in the “high achievement” phase in the arts. The promising talents were screened in rigorous exams and were selected or rejected for The Central Music School or The Gnessin School in Moscow, to study with the best and the toughest and, later, win International Competitions. The school’s vestibule is often in y thoughts, where the often-not-so-friendly-mothers were waiting for their little musicians to take them home. I was “chosen” at my sister’s lesson as someone gifted as I sang themes from the Mendelssohn Concerto she was playing, and was told that I shall be a violinist.