Georgia Straight, Canada
Dec 16 2004

Classical Spin: Tigran Mansurian/Kim Kashkashian

By alexander varty

Monodia (ECM New Series)

According to Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, interviewed in his
new CD’s liner notes, the essence of his country’s music “reveals
itself in an extreme frugality of expressive means. Whether
intonation, rhythm or the shaping of tone colours–everything is
employed very sparingly.” Traditional Armenian melodies, he adds,
“shift as slowly and laboriously as the search for fertile soil among
the jagged Armenian rocks”.

We’re lucky, then, that Mansurian is a modern Armenian, open to
global influences and not bound by his culture’s often tragic past.
He’s happy to take advantage of a variety of expressive
means–Monodia’s two CDs feature a violin concerto, a viola concerto,
a duet for viola and soprano saxophone, and a piece for viola and
four voices–and although some of his charts can be both jagged and
rocky, they also move with the quicksilver speed of the information
age.

Typical of that is …and then I was in time again, scored for
Armenian-American violist Kim Kashkashian and the Münchener
Kammerorchester. It’s true that the overall pace of the work is more
slow than not, and that its melodies have something of the keening
quality typical of Armenian liturgical music. But emotionally, it can
spin the listener from great heights of exaltation to bottomless
despair in the course of a few short seconds. Though championed by
Pierre Boulez, Mansurian does not share his Parisian mentor’s
technocratic bent; instead, he’s concerned with finding sophisticated
ways to project primal feelings of loss, sorrow, terror, and,
occasionally, ecstatic peace.

That’s especially obvious on Lachrymae, a haunting duo for
Kashkashian and saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Here the resources really
are few and the melodic material plain, but Mansurian frames them up
as a kind of dialogue between hope and foreboding. Again, the music
manages to be both harsh and eloquent; those stony fields lie deep in
Mansurian’s soul, but so too does a great deal of urbane
intelligence.

–Boundary_(ID_UCgaVlj+2RjzOi2Ehem1eg)–