Orange County Register, CA
May 26 2007

Trio Nareg are new and exotic

Review: The Armenian musicians of Trio Nareg seek to display the work
of their homeland’s composers.

By PAUL BODINE
Special to the Register

Forget Jordin Sparks. The Trio Nareg are so new that as recently as
this past Monday they had never played together publicly.

A freshly formed conservatory group? It took only a glance at
middle-aged Ani Kavafian, violinist, and Armen Guzelimian, pianist,
to dispatch that theory. Indeed, Istanbul-born Kavafian’s 30-year
career has already included performances (three) at the White House
and Carnegie Hall and she boasts a 28-CD discography that embraces
everyone from Bach and Beethoven to Webern and Wuorinen.

For his part, Guzelimian made his L.A. Philharmonic debut playing
Aram Khachaturian’s piano concerto to Aram Khachaturian, founded Los
Angeles Vocal Arts Ensemble in 1980, and has played or recorded with
the likes of Kiri Te Kanawa, Thomas Hampson and Viktoria Mullova.
Even the trio’s comparative spring chicken, Ani Kalayjian, already
has a master’s in music and numerous festivals under her belt.

So what brought this accomplished crew together now? The answer lay
not only in the trio members’ surnames and collective troupe name but
in the program they chose for Wednesday’s concert at Samueli Theater.
The three Armenians named their trio after an ancient town in their
homeland where that nation’s greatest mystic poet, St. Gregory, wrote
hymns and sacred odes still played today in Armenian churches. And in
crafting their inaugural concert they split the program between the
standard fare of Haydn and Mendelssohn and works by two Armenians:
Arno Babajanian and Tigran Mansurian.

If championing Armenian music to the concert-going public is this new
trio’s reason for being, they face a daunting challenge. Aside from
Khachaturian himself, few Armenian composers get any airtime in
American concert halls today. This, the Naregs persuasively
demonstrated, is a crying shame.

It was Khachaturian who recommended that the five-year-old Babajanian
get musical training, and after studying with Russian composer
Vissarion Shebalin in Moscow (Armenia was then a "Soviet Socialist
Republic"), Babajanian returned to his hometown of Yerevan, Armenia,
and wrote his piano trio. Rarely recorded (though once by David
Oistrakh), it’s a dramatic, commandingly assured work that could
anchor the program of any trio, Armenian or otherwise. Though written
in 1952, its first two movements occasionally recall Rachmaninov in
their Romantic rhetoric and emotional intensity, while the frenzy of
its closing movement, allegro vivace, suggests one of Shostakovich’s
ghoulish scherzos.

Trio Nareg made the best possible case for this music. Newly formed
or not, they synergized well, Guzelimian’s bright, characterful
keyboard work anchoring Kavafian’s urgently expressive playing. As
Guzelimian noted after the intermission, Tigran Mansurian, who spends
three to four months a year at his daughter’s home in Glendale, had
originally intended to be on hand for the trio’s performance of his
1985 `Five Bagatelles.’ He would have liked what he heard. Armenian
music, Mansurian has written, "reveals itself in an extreme frugality
of expressive means. Whether intonation, rhythm or the shaping of
tone color – everything is employed very sparingly." That economy was
everywhere evident in Mansurian’s piece, emotionally uneasy music
that occasionally relaxed into lyricism only to quickly resume its
ambivalence.

Armenian music is no more Trio Nareg’s forte than the standard
repertoire, however, as their compelling execution of the Haydn and
Mendelssohn proved. The excitement and massiveness of sound they
brought to the latter was thrilling. Here’s wishing them a long
career.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress