KOMITAS’ SONGS PERFORMANCE TO BE STAGED IN BALTIC HOUSE
PanARMENIAN.Net
01.04.2008 13:13 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Komitas’ Songs performance will be staged in the
Baltic House April 1, Rosbalt reported with a reference to press
office of Saint Petersburg Committee on culture.
"All dance-lovers will have the possibility to see a performance
nominated for Golden Mask award.
Combination of modern choreography, Armenian folk music and dances
makes the performance unusual and surprising," the press release says.
After success at High Fest film festival in Yerevan, Natalya
Kasparova’s dance group staged Komitas’ Songs in Moscow, Arkhangelsk
and Saint Petersburg.
Komitas, (Soghomon Soghomonyan), an Armenian priest, composer, choir
leader, singer, music ethnologist, music pedagogue and musicologist
was born in 1869 in Kutahya, Ottoman Empire.
In 1881 he entered Echmiadzin Seminary.
>From 1910 he lived and worked in Constantinople. There he established
a 300 member choir Gusan. On April 24, 1915, he was arrested and
put to train the next day together with 180 other Armenian notables
and sent to the city of Cankiri in northern Central Anatolia, at a
distance of some 300 miles. He never fully recovered from these 15
days experience. As of autumn 1916, he was taken to a Turkish military
hospital and he moved to Paris in 1919 where he died in a psychiatric
clinic Villejuif in 1935. Next year his ashes were transferred to
Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.