THE DIVERSE SOUNDS OF TIGRAN MANSURIAN
By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

Los Angeles Times
Calendar Live
April 25 2007

A program of his work traces its roots to Armenia as well as
Modernism. The packed Zipper Hall listens.

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 Part,
the Pole Henryk Gorecki, 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 Bartokian
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.