Hiyoli Togawa SONGS OF SOLITUDE

 

SONGS OF SOLITUDE

 

Kim Kashkashian / Movses Pogossian / Varty Manouelian TIGRAN MANSURIAN Con anima

 

CON ANIMA

 

Rosamunde Quartett TIGRAN MANSURIAN String Quartets

Mansurian writes extremely well for quartet; the textures and polyphonic working are basically traditional, with little in the way of outré effect. … The Second Quartet consists of three slow movements, putting one in mind of the five Adagios of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet. This is a work of ravishing if crepuscular beauty, deeply tonal, whose melodic language is partly influenced by a song by the much-loved Armenian national composer Komitas as well as by Armenian sacred music of the middle ages. … The performances by the Rosamunde Quartett of all three works bespeak utter identification with the music and create a very finely tuned chiaroscuro of quiet dynamics. (Calum MacDonald / International Record Review)

Both string quartets are beautiful, profoundly moving pieces of great consolatory power and expressive strength, albeit in discreet and introspective. However, for all its apparent simplicity, Mansurian’s music cannot be compared with what is now often referred to as Holy Minimalism… Because of its predominantly melodic character, Mansurian is more linear and more coherent from a stylistic point of view. … These splendid performances were recorded under the composer’s supervision and have a strong ring of authenticity. They are not likely to be superseded anytime soon. (Hubert Culot / Music Web)

Imbued with dark emotions, the music is not meant for easy listening, but like a good novel, it communicates a real human condition and predicament. Through these intimate compositions, we get closer to the inner world of Tigran Mansurian, the enigmatic and soulful composer with a searching mind. (Ara Arakelian / The Armenian Reporter inernational) 

  

TIGRAN MANSURIAN Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica is a choral “concerto” based on the poetry of Armenian writer Yegishe Charents (1897-1937). The language is rustic, bumpy, and delectable. The works of Charents, who suffered at the hands of the Stalinist regime and would die in a Yerevan prison for his politically “subversive” writings, were liberated with Stalin’s death in 1953. Likewise, his words seem to wrestle out of their national confines and onto the world stage through Tigran Mansurian’s faithful settings.

“Night” begins with breath; words are only implied, shaped by lips and lungs like rustling leaves. As the choir swells, a deeply affecting baritone solo intones: “But all was pale and dull around me, / No words were there, and there was no sun…” In this first of the Three Night Songs, we are ushered into a place where stillness is aflame. The Three Portraits of Women that follow turn our attention from the ethereal to the corporeal. Mansurian dresses these poems with darkness left over from the waning night. Lines such as “What Spirit was it that brushed / Your countenance in radiant strokes?” feel torn with pain, as if accepting the beauty of one’s love might lead to self-destruction in surrender. Archetypes of angels and maidens wander labyrinthine depths of their own making, impervious to the talons of words seeking purchase on their shoulders. Three Autumn Songs give us our first taste of sunlight trickling through the breaking clouds. Even so, melancholy is never far away, holding us in a lukewarm embrace as voices kneel before the awesome power of all that withers. And Silence Descends brings indefinite closure with a long untitled verse. Intermittent climaxes fall like sudden showers as a single soprano voice cuts through the din with a painful resignation. Language takes on yet another guise in the form of death, creeping along the streets and through back alleys, threatening to erase the text that is one’s existence from its sallow pages.

Mansurian’s compositional style is linguistically informed; not only because he is working with poetry that is already so very musical, but also because the Armenian language is such a vital part of Mansurian’s worldview and expressive deployment. Ars Poetica is a naked and vital work. It screams as its cries, whispering secrets and intimate thoughts as it careens through the cosmos with the quiet restraint of a meteor. Ultimately, it transcends language, bringing with it the promise of internal meanings through which orthography is wrung of its juices and fed to us drop by drop. (ECM Reviews)

TIGRAN MANSURIAN Requiem

Tigran Mansurian has created a Requiem dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide that occurred in Turkey from 1915 to 1917. It reconciles the sound and sensibility of his country’s traditions with the Latin Requiem text in a profoundly moving contemporary composition, illuminated by the “glow of Armenian modality,” as Paul Griffiths puts it in his booklet essay. The work is a milestone for Mansurian, widely acknowledged as Armenia’s greatest composer. The Los Angeles Times has described his music as that “in which deep cultural pain is quieted through an eerily calm, heart-wrenching beauty.”

This album is the sixth to appear in ECM’s documentation of Mansurian’s work, a series that began with the scene-setting Hayren: Music of Komitas And Tigran Mansurian in 2003. That initial recording featured Kim Kashkashian – American violist of Armenian descent and a longstanding ECM artist – in league with Mansurian and percussionist Robin Schulkowsky as they explored the sound world of the iconic Armenian spiritual figure, composer and musicologist Komitas, a key inspiration for Mansurian.

Tigran Mansurian was born in 1939 in Beirut to Armenian parents and first attended school at a French Catholic institution. His family returned in 1947 to their native country, eventually settling in Yerevan, the capital. He graduated from the Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory and later taught the analysis of contemporary music there, along with composing art songs, choral pieces, chamber music, orchestral works, a ballet and film scores. He developed friendly relationships with such performers as Natalya Gutman and Oleg Kagan, as well as fellow composers Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Arvo Pärt. In the early 1990s Mansurian took on the directorship of the Yerevan Conservatory, withdrawing in recent years to concentrate exclusively on composition. (ECM Records)

 

Kim Kashkashian HAYREN Music of Komitas and Tigran Mansurian

Tigran Mansurian’s composition “Nostalgia” was recently hailed as a highlight of Alexei Lubimov’s recital disc Der Bote. Now an important new recording from Kim Kashkashian brings Armenia’s leading contemporary composer to ECM New Series in a programme that also explores the roots of Armenian music. Compositions by Mansurian for viola and percussion, played by Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, receive their premiere recordings here, and frame a selection of Mansurian’s arrangements of the music of Komitas.
Komitas (1869-1935) is revered by Armenians as his nation’s most brilliant songwriter. He was also more than this. Composer, priest, philosopher, poet, ethnomusicologist, collector of folk songs, writer of sacred and secular music that bridged the old and the new …. The fine line that connects the melodic character of the most ancient Armenian music with the works of contemporary Armenian composers runs through Komitas.
In his settings of the Komitas pieces, Mansurian shows us the rich soil from which his own music springs. Analogies can be drawn also with Kashkashian’s last disc, the widely acclaimed “Voci”, on which Berio’s music was set alongside the folksongs that inspired it. In exploring Komitas, American-Armenian violist Kashkashian is also contacting her own roots. Kashkashian and Mansurian understand each other perfectly here. When they first met, the music of Komitas proved a common bond. “The necessity to live with our traditional melodies was already apparent to both of us,” says Mansurian, “and I understood that these pieces belong as much to Kim as they do to Komitas.”
The Mansurian/Kashkashian association was further strengthened by an “Armenian Night” realized with the help of Manfred Eicher, at the 1999 Bergen International Music Festival, in which Kashkashian, Robyn Schulkowsky, and Jan Garbarek participated, along with the Yerevan Chamber Choir and leading Armenian soloists. During the concert some of Mansurian’s works were played for the first time, including the Duet for Viola and Percussion, and “Havik”. Mansurian: “The poetical text and the melody of this song were written by the great 10th century Armenian mystic Grigor Narekatsi.” An early 20th century recording of Komitas singing this song exists, and it inspired Mansurian’s composition, in which he “tried to retain all the nuances of Komitasian performance.”
The album’s title, Hayren alludes to the “poetical style most beloved by Armenians, which has a tradition of centuries.” Mansurian continues, ‘Hayren’ is dense with the phonetics and intonation of our language, and the Armenian landscape and aspects of Armenian worldview and sentiment are also present."

Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Anja Lechner / Amsterdam Sinfonietta / Candida Thompson TIGRAN MANSURIAN Quasi Parlando

“Quasi Parlando” is an important addition to ECM’s documentation of the work of Tigran Mansurian, an often breathtaking account of highly original contemporary chamber orchestra music. Issued in the wake of his 75th birthday, the album opens with the Armenian composer’s fiercely-concentrated Double Concerto, and proceeds to new music performed by its dedicatees: the lyrical Romance, dedicated to Moldavian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and the intensely expressive Quasi Parlando, dedicated to German cellist Anja Lechner. Both are world premiere recordings, as is the Concerto No 2, subtitled Four Serious Songs, which concludes the programme. Throughout, the soloists deliver committed performances, as does the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under the direction of Candida Thompson. 

In the liner notes, Wolfgang Sandner describes title piece Quasi Parlando, composed in 2012, as one of the works which best exemplify Mansurian’s aesthetics of reduction: “Every note is exactly where it belongs. Compositional feeling seems at one with the innate potential of the sounds. Yet we are amazed to hear how the cello’s rhetorical figures congeal into an effective and expressive art that transcends the conceptualisations of speech.” The Romance, composed a year earlier, initially retains the four-bar periods of a simple but moving folk song until the strings enter a dialogue with the solo violin, whereupon a transformation takes place... 

In terms of textural density, Mansurian’s music has seen some changes in the thirty years that separate the composing of the Double Concerto and the Four Serious Songs, but his aesthetic stance has been consistent, both works sharing an immediacy of expression and rigorous creative will. At the same time, the composer encourages a degree of creative freedom from his music’s interpreters: “What is important is what the music needs, not what I need”, he said in a talk given at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, immediately before the recording of these pieces in October 2012. 

Patricia Kopatchinskaja has described the violin part of Four Serious Songs as “pure spirit and magic... Tigran’s music is some of the strongest of our time.”

Kim Kashkashian TIGRAN MANSURIAN Monodia

Tigran Mansurian connects through his work to cultural and emotional groundsprings that are important to him, particularly hints of indigenous Armenian music. He also takes note of his current musical environment, and this sense of inner and outer elements combining informs both the music on these discs and the way it is played – especially by fellow-Armenian Kim Kashkashian. … The Viola Concerto is both moving and mercurial, sometimes grounded in faith or earth, at other times clouded and troubled, even close to defiance… The economically scored Violin Concerto is again rich in unaccompanied material and Leonidas Kavakos seems to relish every note, especially in the many higher-reaching passages. … “Lachrymae” for soprano saxophone and viola finds Kashkashian and Garbarek intertwined in an embrace of pitches and textures, each adapting to, or mirroring, the other’s soundworld. “Confessing Faith” for viola and voices sets prayers by the 12th-century Armenian poet and musician St Nerses Shnorhali, its bold incantations scaling peaks of expressive intensity, especially whenever the countertenor David James enters. The viola’s warm and occasionally abrasive contribution acts as a sort of humanising presence.
Monodia set me thinking along various fronts. Firstly, about the strength and innate soulfulness of Kashkashian’s musicianship, so profoundly suited to the viola. Then the creative excitement of combining unlikely instrumental timbres, and the question of music bridging different faiths, or at the very least different branches of the same faith. … Balancing and sound quality are immaculate.
(Rob Cowan, Gramophone)
 

Kim Kashkashian BETTY OLIVERO / TIGRAN MANSURIAN / EITAN STEINBERG Neharót

 Kim Kashkashian’s new album following her Spanish and Argentinian songs on "Asturiana"olç is a carefully composed prgramme addressing fascinating connections between three contemporary composers from Israel and Armenia. With five pieces respectively based on traditional laments of the Near East, Armenian chant and Hasidic melody, the focus is again on essentially vocal expressivenss. “What we hear in this music touches off resonances below the level of our acquired experience”, writes Paul Griffiths in his liner notes. “Singing these songs, in a hybrid register that embraces male and female, Kashkashian’s viola sings for us all.” Betty Olivero started work on “Neharót Neharót” under the impression of the suffering and pain caused by the war in Lebanon in 2006. Olivero’s hypnotic lament for viola, accordion, percussion, two string ensembles and tape draws on allusions to Kurdish and north African songs, traditional oriental music and Monteverdi. The instrument’s singing abilities come even more to the fore in Tigran Mansurian’s “Three Arias (Sung out the window facing Mount Ararat)” which articulate the Armenian people’s longing for the holy mountain beyond the border. “Rava Deravin” by Israeli Eitan Steinberg is based on a melody for a poem by one of the greatest traditional kabbalists and was first conceived in a version for voice and instrumental ensemble. According to the composer, Kashkashian “manages to cry the prayer from within the strings, to murmur the sacred text with no words”.