Brooklyn Rail, NY
April 7 2007
Notes on Time: The Recent Music of Tigran Mansurian
by Alan Lockwood
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.
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