INSPIRED IN ARMENIA, PLAYED IN L.A.
By Richard S. Ginell, Special to The Times

Los Angeles Times
Oct 3 2006

The Dilijan series, which blends European pieces and works by Armenian
composers, begins a second season.

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.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress