Tigran Mansurian

[MosJan]

Taking note of Mansurian

May 6, 2007

The Boston Globe

Source: Los Angeles Times

By Chris Pasles

 

Armenian composer gains acclaim for strong and emotional works

 

LOS ANGELES -- 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 tastemaking German label ECM has issued four CDs of his music ("Monodia" was nominated for a 2005 Grammy), and a fifth is planned. Recently, 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 last month the Glendale-based Lark Musical Society presented three concerts to commemorate the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

 

Highlights included his epic a cappella choral work, "Ars Poetica," and the US premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, titled "Four Serious Songs," and his Viola Concerto, ". . . and then I was in time again . . ."

 

Mansurian specializes in "very strong, emotional music," said Anja Lechner, cellist of the Munich-based Rosamunde String Quartet, which has recorded three Mansurian works for ECM. "That's maybe why it goes directly to people's hearts."

 

Mansurian believes that music has a spiritual purpose. "There are two main roots to music," he said recently. "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 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, Lebanon, 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 in Southern California.

 

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. "

 

In addition, he said, he always has been drawn to the written word. "As a musician, the Armenian language was one of my first teachers," he said.

 

"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.

 

"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 preferred to regard himself as a composer rather than an Armenian composer.

 

"To be truthful to myself, I have to rely on my genetic memory and my way of praying and my whole being, which is of course very Armenian," he said. "But not in order to be called Armenian -- just in order to be true to myself."

 

[MosJan]

Notes on Time: The Recent Music of Tigran Mansurian

6 April 2007

The Brooklyn Rail

by Alan Lockwood

Mansurian was born in Beirut in 1939; his grandmother had escaped from the Turkish military onslaught to Aleppo, Syria, where she succumbed to malnutrition and his months-old mother was saved by an American missionary. (U.S. activists of that era were stirred by Armenia’s plight, though today’s calls compelling Turkey to acknowledge the twentieth century’s first genocide are thwarted in Congress by NATO alliances.) Mansurian’s family repatriated in what proved to be a Stalinist recruiting ploy. “I went from a French Catholic school in Beirut to a provincial mining town in 1947,” where he found himself the black sheep, he said. Within a decade, the Mansurians were in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, and his professional life in music commenced.

Before ECM began releasing Tigran Mansurian’s music in 2003, the Armenian composer’s finely etched, mid-period chamber music might be found on the U.K.’s Megadisc, with violin and cello concertos dating back to the seventies on the German label Orfeo. Then there was the pared, startling score for Sergei Paradjanov’s 1969 feast of cinematic poetry, The Color of Pomegranates. With last year’s a cappella choral masterwork Ars Poetica, recorded in the sonorous Saghmosavank monastery, a transformation had come full pass, with sterling recent chamber pieces joining new recordings of the violin concerto’s haunting themes and of arch string quartets, all composed in the early eighties. The second of Poetica_’s “Three Autumn Songs,” “Japanese Tankas,” dawns with hushed female voices and then adds bleak ballast with the male voices, welling to a naked momentous peak and a wisp of a protracted unison exit, with that gentle, steely bravura echoed to conclude “And Silence Descends,” the work’s thirteen-minute denouement. _Poetica sets to music the once-banned verse of Yeghishe Charents, the Stalin-era casualty who “brought the rhythmical privileges of Western poetry in to the philosophies of Eastern poetry,” the composer said through a translator from Los Angeles. Preparations were underway there for an ambitious late April festival of his music including Poetica and the concerto “…and then I was in time again,” written for violist Kim Kashkashian and inspired by Quentin Compson from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

 

Hayren, the first of ECM’s four Mansurian offerings, was released under Kashkashian’s name. Titled for the centuries-old Armenian poetic style, it exhibits the renowned violist’s penetrating accuracy of pitch and immensity of feel, teamed with Mansurian and the incisive percussion battery of Robin Schulkowsky on the composer’s transcriptions from songs of Komitas, the choirmaster and musicologist who notated folk traditions that might otherwise have been extinguished in the 1915–17 Armenian genocide, and whose work garnered praise from Debussy. Mansurian’s quavering voice wends a beleaguered labor of love; by the time he reaches the delicately honed “Hoy, Nazan” and “Tsirani Tsar,” the project could sound like the aural equivalent of eyeing indecipherable ancient glyphs—or could resound with a noble, lingering mystique. By bracketing Komitas’s gems with adventuresome duets for Kashkashian and Schulkowsky, Hayren displays Mansurian’s remarkable range: Armenian cultural depths and the synthesis, in his late-sixties, of a lauded Soviet-system artist who has achieved the latitude and collaborative firepower to be generating his most essential music.

 

In speaking of Hayren_’s Komitas songs, Mansurian suggested that bridge between contemporary musical concerns and traditions from the mountainous, transcontinental land between the Black and Caspian seas: “Those songs are from a thousand years ago, when they had no idea of notation or measures. It’s important that anybody dealing with that music not just work with notes and measures, but rather work to feel the freedom of the sound, which is very fragile, and can collapse. This is most important in our relationship to music: to feel the freedom [that comes] from the sounds.” And _Poetica, composed through the late 1990s to Charents’ impassioned, harrowing poems, provides another window into Mansurian’s sound world: the musical emissions of words. Armenian, an Indo-European language that is one of the world’s oldest, resounds with consonant combinations, and the composer’s favorite poet “revitalized its internal breathing that had been forgotten. He brought all these different tonalities from the same letters back in—to give an example, the letter g has three different tones [each of which Mansurian demonstrated, via long distance]. What attracted me was that Charents went back to medieval Armenian poetry, when no poem was written without a very firm foundation. His poetry rivals those foundations, which made my job easier. He plays with the words, and I just continued playing.”

 

Mansurian was born in Beirut in 1939; his grandmother had escaped from the Turkish military onslaught to Aleppo, Syria, where she succumbed to malnutrition and his months-old mother was saved by an American missionary. (U.S. activists of that era were stirred by Armenia’s plight, though today’s calls compelling Turkey to acknowledge the twentieth century’s first genocide are thwarted in Congress by NATO alliances.) Mansurian’s family repatriated in what proved to be a Stalinist recruiting ploy. “I went from a French Catholic school in Beirut to a provincial mining town in 1947,” where he found himself the black sheep, he said. Within a decade, the Mansurians were in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, and his professional life in music commenced.

 

While scoring The Color of Pomegranates (after being awarded first prizes in Moscow’s All-Union competitions in 1966 and ’68), his aptitude for the unconventional came to the fore. Director Paradjanov, also of Armenian heritage, had won international accolades with his stylized Ukrainian flamethrower Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, along with scrutiny at home that would land him a five-year gulag sentence after Pomegranates. “I was thirty years old when I was hired to write music for that film,” Mansurian recalled. “[Paradjanov] was in his mid-forties, and one of the most unique people I’ve ever come across.” Available as a Kino DVD, Pomegranates evokes the life of troubadour Sayat Nova, medieval Armenia’s great voice of love and loss; Paradjanov festooned his tapestry of sumptuous, silent tableaux with Mansurian’s flurrying srings (double-reed flutes), battering drums, and chaotic kamanchas (spiked fiddles), layered into one of cinema’s sonic triumphs. “When I was scoring that movie, it had to be pure feeling; any sort of logic or meaning had to be out of it. It was some sort of energetic thing: one energy going to another energy. The music is not about the tree or the branch, it’s about the sap.”

 

Composed in 1985, with glasnost underway, Mansurian’s Five Bagatelles (on the Megadisc compilation) delve into tone clusters and atonal lines, and ECM’s quartet recording can suggest Shostakovich’s replete detail, though where the Russian wielded mordant wit, Mansurian’s grace rings both limpid and ominous, recalling the air of experimental mid-century piano pieces by Alan Hovhaness. Then ten years ago, “when Kim asked me to write a piece for viola, I jumped on the opportunity like a lion,” having long imagined setting The Sound and the Fury. “Faulkner’s relationship with time was where I always got my strength. A lot of my colleagues would just do the same things—their times were the Soviet times. The phrase ‘…and I was in time again…’ (from Quentin Compson’s opening line, as is The Shadow of the Sash, the title of a mid-1990s chamber work) sounds to me like a rebellious thought against time. When I say ‘time,’ I’m talking of a philosophical category, a relative category.” Citing fifth-century philosopher David Anhaght, Mansurian said “the symbol of time among the numbers is seven, which is also the symbol of virginity, and the concerto is written along the number seven, about virgin time, which is Quentin’s issue. When I wrote it, I chose viola because it is the most mystical instrument there is.”

 

Annual remembrance of the Armenian genocide occurs on April 24, and three Mansurian concerts highlight the L.A. commemoration. After the evening-length Ars Poetica, a night of chamber music includes Agnus Dei _for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, premiered last year in Germany, and the third string quartet. On April 25, Kim Kashkashian plays _“…and then I was in time again” during an orchestral evening. In a phone interview, American-born Kashkashian recalled her introduction to Mansurian. “We were in his apartment, and he sang songs for me,” she said. “Armenia is a small country and with anyone whose name ends in ‘ian,’ as I am on their radar, they are on my radar. But there were also affinities of aesthetic and ethics when Tigran and I met, and we were both very interested in the Komitas transcriptions. We had many starting points, and that work continues.”

 

Last year, violist Ara Gregorian and the ensemble Concertante approached Mansurian to commission what Gregorian termed “a cross between a solo piece for each instrumentalist, and a piece for the sextet.” Gregorian began studying ECM’s releases and found Confessing with Faith, written for Kashkashian and the Hilliard Ensemble, “an unbelievable piece, in the way he used the viola as a singing and expressive voice, played against the vocal quartet.” The new work, Con Anima, was played at Merkin in late March. The second violin concerto, Four Serious Songs, premiered in Sweden in January and is to be played during the L.A. events. It is the likely centerpiece of ECM’s next release, as the label samples Mansurian’s vivid oeuvre, and documents his current work.

 

The U.S. premiere of Agnus Dei is April 6 at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, and on May 10 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents the New York premiere of Duo for Viola and Percussion.

 

[MosJan]

Works

String Quartet No. 1 (1960)

 

Sonata for viola and piano (1962)

 

Piano Sonatina No. 1 (1963)

 

Petite Suite for piano (1963)

 

Sonata for flute and piano (1963)

 

String Quartet No. 2 (1964)

 

Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano (1964)

 

"Allegro Barbaro" for cello (1964)

 

Concerto for organ and chamberorchestra (1964)

 

Partita for large orchestra (1965)

 

Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano (1965)

 

Suite for instruments and piano(1965)

 

Piano Trio (1965)

 

"Psalm" for two flutes and violin (1966)

 

Three Romances after F.G. Lorca for mezzo-soprano and piano (1966)

 

Translated by Hamo Sahyan.

 

Book of Sad Songs after C. Khatsharezi for three men's voices, string quartet, two flutes and piano (1966)

 

Music for twelve stringinstruments (1966)

 

Piano Sonata No. 1 (1967)

 

Four Hayrens for mezzo-soprano and piano (1967)

 

Text by Nahapet Kuchak.

 

Music to the film "The Color of Pomegranate" (1968)

 

Arabesques I for six windinstruments and harp (1969)

 

Three Poems after Kostan Sarhan for mixed chorus a cappella (1969)

 

Miniatures for piano (1969)

 

Music to the Film "We and Our Mountains" (1969)

 

Arabesques II for ten instruments (1970)

 

Three Pieces for piano (1970-1971)

 

Elegy for cello and piano (1971)

 

Interior for string quartet (1972)

 

Two Elegies for violin and piano (1972)

 

"Silhouet of a Bird", three parts for harpsichord and percussion (1971-1973)

 

CD Megadisc MDC 7839: Studio for New Music Moscow, Igor Dronov (cond)

 

"Intermezzo" for soprano and instruments (1972-1973)

 

Text by Vladimir Holan.

Lost

 

Sonate No. 1 for cello and piano (1973)

 

Sonata No. 2 for cello and piano (1974)

 

Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn (1974)

 

"I'm Giving You a Rose" for soprano, flute, cello and piano (1974)

 

Text by Matevos Sarifyan.

 

Preludes for large orchestra (1975)

 

Three Nairian Songs for baritone and large orchestra (1975-1976)

 

Text by Vahan Teryan.

 

"The Moon Dancing on the Sound of the Shawm", madrigal for soprano, flute, cello and piano (1976)

 

Nostalgia for piano (1976)

 

Concerto No. 1 for cello and large orchestra "To the memory of D. Shostakovich" (1976)

 

Canonical Ode for four harps, organ and two string orchestras (1977)

 

Concerto No. 2 for cello and string orchestra (1978)

 

Double Concerto for violin, cello and string orchestra (1978)

 

"The Rhetorician" for harpsichord, flute, violin and double-bass (1978)

 

Three Pieces in low keys for piano (1979)

 

Tovem for 15 instrumentalists (1979)

 

Music to the Film "Osenneye solntse – Autumn Sun" (1979)

 

Music to the Film "Legend of the Clown" (1979)

 

Music to the Film "King John" (1979)

 

Music to the Film "Coriolanus" (1979)

 

Music to the Film "a Piece of Sky" (1979)

 

Nightmusic for orchestra (1980)

 

Three Madrigals for soprano, flute, cello and piano (1974-1981)

 

Text by Razmik Davoyan.

 

CD Megadisc MDC 7839: Studio for New Music Moscow, Igor Dronov (cond)

 

"Because I don't hope", commemorating Igor Stravinsky for 15 instruments (1981)

 

Capriccio for cello solo (1981)

 

CD Megadisc MDC 7839: Studio for New Music Moscow, Igor Dronov (cond)

 

Concerto for violin and string orchestra (1981)

 

Concerto No. 3 for cello and 13 windinstruments (1983)

 

For two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, two French horns, trumpet and trombone.

 

Four Duets for violin ensemble (1983)

 

String Quartet No. 1 (1983-1984)

 

Duration: 23 minutes.

 

ECM New Series 1905 (4763052): Rosamunde Quartett

 

String Quartet No. 2 (1984)

 

Duration: 22 minutes.

 

ECM New Series 1905 (4763052): Rosamunde Quartett

 

"Sunset Songs", songcycle for soprano and piano (1984-1985)

 

Text by Hamo Sahyan.

 

Five Bagatelles for violin, cello and piano (1985)

 

CD Megadisc MDC 7839: Studio for New Music Moscow, Igor Dronov (cond)

 

"The Land of Nairi", songcycle for soprano and piano (1986)

 

Text by Vahan Teryan.

 

Piano Sonatina No. 2 (1987)

 

"The Ice-Queen", choreographic sketches after H. Chr. Andersen (1988)

 

"Tombeau" for cello and percussion instruments (1988)

 

"Miserere" after M. Mashtoz and the bible for soprano and stringorchestra (1989)

 

Texts by St. Mesrop Mashtots and the Bible in Armenian translation.

 

"The Ice-Queen", ballet in two acts after H. Chr. Andersen (1989-1990)

 

Scenario by Vilen Galstyan.

 

"Madrigal IV" for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and tubular bells (1991)

 

Text by Alicia Kirakosyan.

 

Postludio for clarinet and cello (1991-1992)

 

String Quartet No. 3 (1992)

 

Postludio, concerto for clarinet, cello and string orchestra (1993)

 

"The Shadow of the Sash", concerto for nine wind instruments in five parts (1995)

 

Dedicated to André Volkonsky.

For English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two trumpets and two trombones.

 

Concerto for viola and string orchestra "And then I was in time again" (1995)

 

Dedicated to Kim Kashkashian.

 

Spring Songs for mixed chorus (1996)

 

Text by Hovhannis Tumanyan.

 

Hommage a Anna Akhmatova for bass clarinet, qanun (zither), viola and marimba (1997)

 

Duo for viola and percussion (1998)

 

Dance for viola and percussion (1998)

 

"Confessing with Faith" for four male voices and viola (1998)

 

Text by St. Nerses Shnorhali.

 

Verse in a Burned Cover for Kanon in D major, viola, marimbafone and bass-clarinet (1998)

 

Dedicated to Anna Achmatova.

 

"Lacrimae" for soprano saxophone and viola (1999)

 

"Ars Poetica", concerto for mixed choir a cappella (1996-2000)

 

After poems by Yeghishe Charents.

Parts:

Part I: Three Night Songs

Part II: Three Portraits of Women

Part III: Three Autumn Songs

Part IV: And Silence Descends

 

CD ECM 1895: Armenian Chamber Choir, Robert Mlkeyan (cond)

 

Motet for two mixed choruses (2000)

 

Text by Grigor Narekatsi.

 

"Lamento" for violin (2002)

 

Also version for viola (2002)

 

"On the Shores of Eternity" for mixed chorus (2003)

 

Text by Avetik Isahakyan.

 

Fantasy for piano and string orchestra (2003)

 

"Three Medieval Taghs" for viola and percussion (1998-2004)

 

"Testament" for string quartet (2004)

 

Dedicated to Manfred Eicher.

Duration: 5 minutes.

 

ECM New Series 1905 (4763052): Rosamunde Quartett

[Arvestaked]

I love Mansurian's music. I own "Ars Poetics", "Monodia" and "String Quartets".

 

 

People should also listen to:

 

Ashot Zograbyan

Vatche Sharafyan

Avet Terteryan

[Arvestaked]

Violinist Ani Kavafian will be performing a couple of concerts this week in the L.A. area (Burbank and Costa Mesa) with Trio Nareg. They will be playing some music by Mansurian.

[Anoushik]

Wow, I just noticed this thread. Thanks Mosjan and Arvestaked!