Varduhi Yeritsyan SWEET DREAMS

SWEET DREAMS

Varduhi Yeritsyan SCRIABIN Piano Sonatas

A fellow student of Rachmaninov’s at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied under Arensky and Taneyev, Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) occupies a unique sphere in Russian music.  Rejecting the vocal and folkloristic music that occupied most of his contemporaries, he wrote exclusively for piano and for orchestra.  His musical language constantly evolved over the length of his life, passing from the early influence of Chopin and Liszt, through a Wagnerian period, before reaching an atonal style that gazes far into the future of the 20^th century’s sound world. Scriabin was a typical representative of the symbolism that flourished at the turn of the 20^th century: fascinated by philosophy and esoteric doctrines, particularly theosophy, as well as by synesthesia, he studied the links between sounds and colours and elaborated a complementary colour wheel where the circle of keys and the light spectrum were paralleled.  A fantastic and eccentric character, he believed himself to be music’s Messiah, and plotted to build a temple in India for himself, where his planned masterpiece would be performed, entitled Mystery, which would be humanity’s aesthetic and spiritual culmination.  His premature death at the age of 43 put an end to that chimera.  For or with orchestra, Scriabin composed, along with a short prelude entitled Rêverie, a piano concerto, three symphonies, and two symphonic poems: the Poem of Ecstasy (1907) and Prometheus (1910).  His large pianistic output consists of ten sonatas and a great number of miniatures: preludes, etudes, mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes, poems, and assorted other pieces…

Scriabin’s ten sonatas (to which must be added two youthful attempts) punctuate some twenty years of his life from 1893 to 1913. It is important to note that he is the first composer to regularly return to the piano sonata, which had fallen into marked disfavour since Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B-minor and Brahms’s three scores from the early 1850s.  Other Russians would follow his example, notably Medtner (fourteen sonatas) and Prokofiev (nine).

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.