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April 1, 2008
Dilijan group is on a mission
Concert at Zipper Hall is a tapestry of Armenian works.
By Josef Woodard, Special to The Times
A stated goal of the impressive Dilijan Chamber Music Series, now in its third season, has been to celebrate the riches of Armenian music and give a forum to Armenian musicians based in Los Angeles and beyond.
By blending Armenian music with that of other cultures, Dilijan (named after an Armenian resort city) weaves a tapestry of a larger culture.
That mission reached a high point Sunday afternoon at Zipper Hall with the U.S. premieres of three fascinating Armenian pieces, by Artur Avanesov, Eduard Hayrapetian and Tigran Mansurian (who was in the hall). Armenian strengths aside, the program was also neatly divided between Armenian and Hungarian music, and it was a Hungarian composer whose voice rose above the others.
György Ligeti's trio for horn, violin and piano, "Hommage ŕ Brahms," has an unfair advantage in that it is, as violinist and series director Movses Pogossian rightly told the crowd, a "crown jewel" of chamber music literature. Wisely, Pogossian programmed a seamless segue into the Ligeti out of György Kurtág's short, coolly evocative "Tre Pezzi." That 1979 piece demonstrates Kurtág's keen ability to suggest a dream state through music -- neither a pleasant nor a harsh dream but a place dislodged from rational reality.
Ligeti's horn trio, played with mesmerizing aplomb by horn player Richard Todd, pianist Vicki Ray and Pogossian, was a stunner, surely one of the chamber music highlights of the season in the Southland. The Brahms connection is oblique, hinted at in phrasing and structural elements, but the harmonic language is Ligeti's seductive tough talk, expressed in complex, surprising and cathartic sweeps of energy.
Avanesov, the youngest composer on the bill (born in 1980), projects a strong and sensitive assurance in
" . . . leise . . . ", a short piece for piano and clarinet played solidly by Armen Guzelimian and Phil O'Connor, respectively. A subtle and airy thing, it wafts on romantic and impressionistic influences, though clearly from a contemporary starting point, and it whetted one's appetite for more from this promising composer.
Hayrapetian's "Sonata for Two Violins and Piano," circa 1988, craftily mixes a neo-Romantic spirit with tonalities and melodic synchronizations that move beguilingly in and out of focus. Violinists Pogossian and Endre Granat were the suitably dizzying conversationalists.
Mansurian has gained increasing attention in recent years, partly through his expanding international exposure via ECM recordings. What we heard, though, was a pocket-sized 1965 piece written when the composer was in his 20s. Mansurian's "Little Suite," played by Guzelimian, is an admixture of gnarly dissonance, folkish asides and otherwise Bartók-ish manners. It led naturally into the concert's closer, Bartók's "Contrasts."
The most familiar piece of the afternoon, "Contrasts" is a mélange of the composer's classic modernism and jazzy flavorings, written for clarinetist Benny Goodman and violinist Josef Szigeti in 1938. Here, the exacting performing parties were O'Connor, Granat and Guzelimian.
To have a Bartók work as the closest thing to a war horse on a concert program says a lot about the courage and exploratory spirit of the Dilijan project. Keep an ear out.
April 25, 2007
The diverse sounds of Tigran Mansurian
A program of his work traces its roots to Armenia as well as Modernism. The packed Zipper Hall listens.
By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer
Tigran Mansurian's time may not have quite arrived, but it's getting very close. The Colburn School's Zipper Hall was full Monday for the chamber music component of "A Mansurian Triptych," three concerts sponsored by the Lark Musical Society. Friday night had been devoted to choral works. Tonight at the Alex Theatre in Glendale two big concertos are scheduled, including one for violin that premiered in Sweden this year.
Zipper was full because the concerts were programmed to coincide with the anniversary of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and because Mansurian is, for Armenians — of whom there are many in Southern California — a legendary musical figure. The rare presence of the composer onstage to accompany violist Kim Kashkashian in arrangements of "Four Hayrens" — short pieces of profound beauty from 1967, originally written for voice and piano — was the kind of thing you take your children to so they can tell their grandchildren about it.
In fact, it probably doesn't make much sense to try to separate Mansurian's works from what they represent to a people who have had more than their share of cultural and political struggles in modern history. Yet though his music is Armenian to the core, it also shares many of the spiritual concerns of other Eastern European composers of his post-Shostakovich generation, including the Estonian Arvo Pärt, the Pole Henryk Górecki, the Georgian Giya Kancheli, the Russian Alfred Schnittke, the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov and the Tartar Sofia Gubaidulina.
Like them, Mansurian, who was born in 1939, is a former musical dissident who as a young man adopted forbidden Western Modernist techniques but later reconciled them with more traditional music of deep religious conviction.
The six chamber works Monday covered nearly 40 years, yet the kinship between "Four Hayrens" and the Agnus Dei for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, written last year, was evident. In both, Mansurian displayed melodic restraint. Lyricism is ever present as is a gentleness of spirit. Expression comes in small, intense moments, in tiny tremblings of tone.
In the Agnus Dei, which lasted 15 mesmerizing minutes, the clarinet (exquisitely played by Gary Bovyer) reached such a degree of quiet tenderness that the ending felt more like a mystical breeze lightly touching the skin than sound waves striking the ear.
The String Quartet No. 3 begins in a harsher, almost Bartókian fashion, but it too ends somewhere beyond, with an Adagio full of strange outbursts and ethereal violin solos. The gripping, expert performance was by violinists Movses Pogossian and Searmi Park, violist Alma Fernandez and cellist Armen Ksajikian. If they haven't thought of forming a quartet, they should.
Madrigal II from 1976 is an attempt to wed Armenian music and Monteverdi for soprano, flute, cello and piano. Soloist Shoushik Barsoumian's nervousness was part hers, part the music's, though both score and soprano eventually quieted down.
"Lamento" for solo violin, written in 2002, begins wrathfully but also gradually calms to a state of sad resignation. The violin writing is virtuosic, and Pogossian, one of the tribute's organizers, played it very well.
After "Four Hayrens," in which Mansurian proved downright haunting in the intensity of his piano playing, Kashkashian joined Lynn Vartan in Duet for viola and percussion, written for the violist in 1998. The work, given its West Coast premiere last week at the University of Judaism, is, like its title, abstract, a study in the raw expression of sound.
Here, it was Kashkashian who cast a spell with every tone she played. Vartan supported her with a rainbow of shimmering effects on marimba and gongs. The score seemed both very old and very modern, very sophisticated and very elemental, all at the same moment.
mark.swed@latimes.com
April 20, 2007 Tigran Mansurian digs deep for his craft
Perhaps Armenia's top living composer, he says writing music is always a struggle.
By Chris Pasles, Times Staff Writer
Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian may not be a household name. But in his homeland, in Armenian diaspora communities and in Europe's new music circles, he is regarded as Armenia's greatest living composer. Recently, he's been getting even wider notice.
The taste-making German label ECM has issued four CDs of his music ("Monodia" was nominated for a 2005 Grammy), and a fifth is planned. Within the last month, New York has heard two U.S. premieres: "Con Anima" for string sextet at Merkin Concert Hall and an Agnus Dei for clarinet, violin, cello and piano at Carnegie Hall. And between tonight and Wednesday night, the Glendale-based Lark Musical Society, which sponsors the enterprising Dilijan Chamber Music Series, is presenting "A Mansurian Triptych" — three concerts programmed to commemorate the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
Mansurian's epic a cappella choral work, "Ars Poetica," will be performed tonight at the downtown L.A. Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall. Selections from his chamber music, including the Agnus Dei, will be played Monday at Zipper. And on Wednesday, orchestral works, including the U.S. premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, titled "Four Serious Songs," and his Viola Concerto, " … and then I was in time again … ," will be played at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.
What audiences will hear is "very strong emotional music," according to Anja Lechner, cellist of the Munich, Germany-based Rosamunde String Quartet, which has recorded three Mansurian works for ECM. "That's maybe why it goes directly to people's hearts."
Mansurian himself believes that music has a spiritual purpose. "There are two main roots to music," he said in an interview this week. "The first one is the religious, Christian aspect, the issue of pain and spirituality, the pain of Christ being crucified and the guilt that comes from it and our relationship to God. The second one is our instinctive search for Paradise Lost. That's what makes music."
Because he shifted between Armenian and Russian, Mansurian was speaking through several interpreters at the Lark Musical Society offices. A gentle, elegant man with flowing white hair, he spoke in a light, precise tenor, often animating his remarks with eloquently shaped gestures that belied the struggle he said composing has always been for him.
"Since childhood to now, my fingertips are bleeding from the conflict," he said. "It was always my personal fight or mission."
Born Jan. 27, 1939, to Armenian parents in Beirut, he moved with his family to Soviet Armenia in 1947 and then in 1956 to the capital, Yerevan, where they settled. He studied at the Yerevan Music Academy and at the Komitas State Conservatory, where, after earning a doctorate, he taught and later became rector.
He won two first prizes in the All-Union competition in Moscow in 1966 and 1968 and the Armenian State Prize in 1981.
Armenia is still his home, but his daughter, Nvart Sarkissian, lives in Glendale, and because his wife, Nora Aharonian, died last year, he plans to spend more time here.
His early works combined neoclassicism and Armenian folk traditions. Subsequently, he adopted 12-tone and serial techniques. His more recent works are a mix of all these influences.
"I have tried to find myself in the old Armenian music," he said. "I have tried to find myself in Boulez's serialism. When you go deep in these traditions, you will find the things that are true to your individual roots. Generally, I compose what's been developing and growing inside me for a long time."
In addition, he said, he has always been drawn to the written word. "As a musician, the Armenian language was one of my first teachers," he said. "One's childhood tongue and the first impressions of language are very important for any musician."
"Four Hayrens," for example, is a setting of Armenian poems. "Ars Poetica" consists of poems by Yeghishe Charents, a victim of Stalin's purges. The title of his Viola Concerto, " … and then I was in time again … " is a line spoken by Quentin Compson, the doomed hero of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury."
"I have devoted 10 years of my life to Faulkner," he said, before spontaneously reciting the opening of that novel in Russian.
"He's difficult, but once you go into Faulkner, there is no higher joy. If I were to choose the person who was most significant to me, it would have been Quentin because of his incredible honesty."
Mansurian read the book first in Russian, but upon later reading an Armenian translation, he said, he discovered that the Soviet version had been heavily censored.
"Just like the Soviet state got involved in every other aspect of life, it got involved in translations," he said. "That's how things were done."
Living under the Soviet system, he added, was "some sort of different Faulknerian tale. It was another monumental feeling of loss."
For all his identification with his homeland, Mansurian said he prefers to regard himself as a composer rather than an Armenian composer.
chris.pasles@latimes.com
January 9, 2007
Kafkaesque, in a good way
The repertoire for soprano and solo violin isn't large, but it does contain the masterful 'Kafka Fragments.'
by Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer
Ever claustrophobic, Kafka could not stomach big words. "If uttered by a young woman, breathlessly," the marvelous Italian writer Roberto Calasso notes in his magisterial recent study of the writer, "he had the impression that they emerged 'like fat mice from her little mouth.' "
That image alone should be enough to scare composers away from setting Kafka texts, what with music's fondness for fattening every syllable. And how many young sopranos are willing to accept rotund rodents as a side effect of song?
No Kafka-inspired opera has stuck. It might be tempting to argue that Kafka simply does not call for music, were Gyorgy Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments" for the unusual combination of soprano and solo violin not a masterpiece. Introducing a performance of the hourlong cycle at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon, violinist Movses Pogossian aptly noted the difficulty in discovering just where the Czech writer ends and the Hungarian composer begins.
Written in 1986, "Kafka Fragments" was immediately recognized as something special. But so demanding on performers and so draining on listeners is this cycle of 40 short musical incidents (ranging from around 15 seconds to 7 minutes) that it was rarely encountered until recently.
Two years ago, Peter Sellars staged it for soprano Dawn Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall as the devastating psychosexual inner life of a wife cleaning house, watching Iraq disintegrate on television and falling apart. Last year, in honor of Kurtag's 80th birthday, ECM released a new recording by Juliane Banse and Andras Keller of the "Fragments" as intensely focused understated drama.
Pogossian, an Armenian violinist, and a young American soprano, Tony Arnold, are now touring the "Fragments" in preparation for another new recording on Bridge Records. Their powerful performance Sunday was part of Dilijan, a chamber music series for which Pogossian is artistic director.
Dilijan, named for a resort town in Armenia, has the mission of furthering Armenian music, and Pogossian began the program with three short works connected in one way or another to Armenia. All three were also meant to further the soprano/violin duo repertory, of which there isn't much.
But first some praise for Pogossian, who is a terrific violinist. He has the flair and the huge technique of a Romantic-era specialist, a virtuosity and magnetism that he applies to newer music. Dilijan is an ambitious and interesting series, which draws excellent musicians. But its main flaw is that it thus far doesn't seem to promote itself outside the Armenian community. That is enough to fill about half the 415-seat Zipper. These concerts, and particularly Pogossian, deserve much wider exposure.
The three introductory pieces were intriguing if minor. John Asatryan's "Dou Merzhetsir" was an arrangement for violin and soprano of a somber work by a midcentury Armenian composer. Paolo Cavallone's "Frammenti Lirici" and Artur Avanesov's "In Luys" were world premieres by young composers. The first is an Italian avant-gardist's deconstruction of an Armenian tune used in Berio's "Folk Songs." The second is a rhapsodic rendering of Kilikian folk song with an especially memorable violin part.
"Kafka Fragments" is a journey, and that is how Arnold and Pogossian approached it. Arnold is an impressive singer, with operatic projection and tremendous flexibility. She has recently made a very good recording of George Crumb's "Ancient Voices for Children," which has been nominated for a Grammy. In the first half of the program she was commanding.
The Kafka fragments selected by Kurtag from diary entries are individual peerings into both the composer's and the writer's inner life. Sunday's performance seemed to separate the two.
Pogossian's characterful, concentrated playing conveyed the complex context that Kurtag give his music, cross-referencing earlier composers, paying tributes to contemporaries and conveying his own concentrated inner sound world.
Arnold, though, is more an overt illustrator. Some fragments go off like bombs. "Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life" — the musical shards are soft, shockingly loud, soft, shockingly loud. She sings with her body, her face, her eyes, which can be very effective in a Schubert song cycle.
But what I most missed was the deeper meaning of this journey. Arnold appeared unchanged by Kurtag and Kafka. An hour passed by the clock. Many small stories were told, many fat mice flew out of her mouth. Then time was up. It should feel as though time slows down. Unlike Arnold, Upshaw became a new and different, wiser and deeper woman, and an audience could be altered too, after a clock-stopping Kafka-Kurtag immersion.
Still, the dedication and attention to detail by Arnold and Pogossian was moving, and I look forward to the recording. All Arnold really needs is a good drama coach who doubles as a Kafkaesque exterminator.
October 3, 2006
Inspired in Armenia, played in L.A.
The Dilijan series, which blends European pieces and works by Armenian composers, begins a second season.
by Richard S. Ginell, LA Times
Dilijan is a forested Armenian resort town not far from Lake Sevan that has attracted composers and musicians over the decades. It is also the inspiration for the Dilijan Chamber Music Concert Series in faraway Los Angeles, which began its second season in the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon.
So far, the launch seems to have taken hold. The series has a concept — mixing standard European repertoire with works by Armenian composers — a marvelously warm-sounding acoustical space, top-notch guest artists and a built-in audience from the L.A. area's vast, loyal Armenian community that filled most of the seats Sunday. And as the lineup of musicians indicated, you don't have to be Armenian to play.
In the field of new or overlooked repertoire, Dilijan scored big with the powerful Violin Sonata of Arno Babajanian (1921-1983), who may be the best-known Armenian composer in the West after Aram Khachaturian. Like Khachaturian, Babajanian was a nationalist who was never fashionable among the new-music gatekeepers, despite his embrace of serial ideas late in life. But this piece has universal substance amid the Armenian flavor, with its turbulent first movement themes and development, its ghostly interludes in the second and third movements, its laconically singing passages that recall Shostakovich.
Violinist Movses Pogossian — who is also the artistic director of the Dilijan series — audibly identified with this piece to his core, producing a particularly striking, thin yet taut steel-wire tone in the muted passages of the second movement. Pianist Robert Thies was his sympathetic partner.
The chief marquee name on the program was violinist Ani Kavafian, who with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra violist Roland Kato and cellist Antonio Lysy offered a bustling rendition of Beethoven's String Trio, Opus 9, No. 1, whose skittering, whirlwind finale seems to anticipate the scherzos of Mendelssohn.
Then all five musicians came together in Brahms' mighty Piano Quintet in F minor — conventionally paced, with enough virile weight, lush symphonic textures in the lower middle range, and streaks of vehemence in the scherzo and finale. Understandably, after this heavy main course, there were no encores.
October 3, 2006
Violinist Strives To Bring Armenian Music To Mainstream
By Suzy Cazandjian
When violinist Movses Pogossian was appointed artistic director of the newly formed Los Angeles-based Dilijan Chamber Music Series in 2005, he faced a formidable challenge: bringing Armenian music performed by high caliber musicians to the mainstream. Pogossian has successfully embarked on this path with the recent completion of Dilijan's six-concert inaugural season. By presenting Armenian works side-by-side with Western repertoire performed by acclaimed musicians at Zipper Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the series has attracted an Armenian as well as non-Armenian audience.
"I just love directing this series; it is a wonderful thing for Armenian music," said Pogossian who was recently in Detroit to be a guest on the Heritage of Armenian Culture Radio. The feature on Pogossian will air on Sunday, May 21 at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time at www.wnzk.com (to access click on the link "Listen to WNZK" on the left-hand side of the Web page) and on WNZK 680 AM in Detroit. The Dilijan Chamber Music Series was founded by Lark Music Society members under the leadership of conductor Vatsche Barsoumian. Besides showcasing traditional pieces of Western classical chamber music and Armenian chamber works performed by acclaimed musicians, Dilijan also presents world premieres of chamber music by contemporary Armenian composers. Works by Edward Mirzoyan, Aram Khachaturian, Alan Hovhaness, Arno Babajanian and Gomidas were presented this past season as well as world premieres by Tigran Mansurian and Vache Sharafyan.
Sharafyan received critical acclaim as a composer for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. "We had so many positive comments from our audience members about Sharafyan's compositions; they were moved by the emotional message of his music," said Pogossian.
Slated for next season are world premieres of newly commissioned works by David Haladjian, Artur Avanesov and Paolo Cavallone. Guest artists will include violist Kim Kashkashian, violinists Ani Kavafian and Ida Levin, and pianists Sarkis Baltaian and Norman Krieger.
Pogossian possesses an impressive array of accomplishments. Since making his critically acclaimed American debut with the Boston Pops performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in 1990, Pogossian has embarked on a multi-dimensional career. A native of Armenia, he studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory where he completed his doctorate. At the age of 19, Pogossian became the youngest ever first prize winner of the Seventh All-USSR National Violin Competition in 1985. He later went on to win prizes in the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow and the 1991 Rodolfo Lipizer International Violin Competition in Italy. He has performed with major orchestras around the world including the Moscow Philharmonic, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra and the State Philharmonic Orchestras of Estonia, Georgia and Armenia.
In 1989, Pogossian received a fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. He has performed chamber music with members of the Tokyo, Kronos and Brentano String Quartets. Additionally, he frequently collaborates with the New Hampshire-based Apple Hill Chamber Players, participating in Apple Hill's "Playing for Peace" tours and since 1992 returning annually to Apple Hill's Summer Chamber Music Festival and School where he is a faculty member. Pogossian is currently visiting artist teacher at the State University of New York-Buffalo and a member of the Baird Piano Trio. He has previously served on the faculties of Duquesne, Bowling Green and Wayne State Universities.
"I am very encouraged by our first season and by world-famous musicians performing Armenian pieces and telling me that this is great music. I want to spread our music, not only to audiences, but to performers as well. This will be the most effective way for us to broaden the recognition of Armenian music," said Pogossian.
The Dilijan Chamber Music Series is financed largely through contributions. |
