KRADJIAN SHINES FROM THE SHADOWS
John Terauds

Toronto Star
548613
Dec 6 2008
Ontario

Accompanying and arranging music for his wife, Isabel Bayrakdarian,
has paid off with Grammy nod

Some people prefer working alone in the spotlight. Others draw strength
and inspiration from collaborations.

Toronto pianist Serouj Kradjian belongs in the second category,
which may be why not many of us are yet aware of the substantial
talent living and working in our midst.

His biggest claim-to-fame right now is accompanying and arranging music
for his wife, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. Their latest collaboration,
a disc of songs by Armenian composer Gomidas, which Kradjian arranged
for chamber orchestra, earned Bayrakdarian a Grammy nomination for
Best Vocal Performance on Wednesday night.

As of this season, the pianist has also become a member of the
Amici Chamber Ensemble, as well as writing new music for them. This
high-powered chamber group includes Toronto Symphony principal clarinet
Joaquin Valdepeñas and assistant principal cello David Hetherington.

What you won’t find Kradjian doing, at least in this part of the world,
is playing solo piano.

The roots of his unprepossessing need to share comes from an early
childhood in civil war-ravaged Beirut. Kradjian, now in his mid-30s,
is the oldest of four boys, born of Armenian ex-pats living in Lebanon
– by many accounts, an idyllic place to live before it was torn apart
by civil war starting in the mid-1970s.

Kradjian’s parents weren’t going to let anything get in the way of
their son’s musical education. "When my father decided to bring in a
piano in the middle of the war, everybody thought he’s crazy, because
that was the last thing people were thinking about," Kradjian relates
of a fateful day when he was 5 years old.

The piano was carried up to the family’s fourth-floor apartment in
downtown Beirut, "where it became a source of love, if I can describe
it in one word," Kradjian continues.

The building’s residents would cower in basement bunkers during periods
of heavy shelling. "When there was a break in the bombardments, my
father would take me up to the fourth floor so that I could practise
a bit," the pianist recalls.

"My parents used to sit beside me when I practised – they were vocal
critics sometimes, appreciative sometimes – but it really became
something which made us forget for a while the situation outside.

"That’s my memory of what this instrument could do."

Even though a piano is not portable, Kradjian’s father had chosen it
because there were a lot of piano teachers around, he says.

By the 1980s, the Kradjians, like so many other Lebanese, had given
up on peace returning to their ruined country. They were also afraid
that their sons would eventually be called for military service,
so they emigrated to Toronto.

Kradjian graduated with a degree in piano performance from the
University of Toronto in 1994, then went to the world-renowned
Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Hanover, Germany, to study with
a favourite pianist, Einar Steen-Nokleberg. "His claim to fame is
the complete Grieg works for piano for the Naxos label," Kradjian
says. "It’s wonderful. For me, it’s the recording of those pieces."

Kradjian hadn’t made a final commitment to a piano career until he
went to Germany. There, the school emphasized practical work over
theory. It is also where he discovered the joys of collaborating
with other musicians instead of spending solitary hours every day
practising solo material. "Looking around, all I saw was participating
in competitions. For most of my friends, not only pianists, it was
the thing to do," says Kradjian.

"So I made a conscious decision. It was not that I didn’t like
competitions, but I found them too limiting and too lonely, both
on the stage and off the stage. I wanted to explore every type of
music making."

After graduating from Hanover, Kradjian took a teaching post at
the conservatory in Madrid, and made his first solo recordings with
Warner Music Spain. He is still officially on the faculty, but only
goes for master classes.

"Toronto is my main home base now," says Kradjian. He and Bayrakdarian
have a son, Ari, who turned 1 yesterday. Home is an important place
to be right now.

Kradjian says the first chamber music concert he ever attended was
given by Amici. Patricia Parr, the ensemble’s pianist for two decades,
was his chamber-music teacher at U of T. So he feels honoured to be
able to pick up where Parr left off after retiring at the end of the
2005-06 season.

Kradjian’s professional ideal is French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet,
known worldwide as a superb accompanist and chamber-music collaborator
– as well as a top solo performer.

Tomorrow afternoon, Amici is getting together at the Glenn Gould
Studio to will play a new composition by Kradjian, as well as Olivier
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, in honour of what would have
been the French composer’s 100th birthday on Dec. 10. (For ticket info,
go to glenngouldstudio.cbc.ca/concerts/current/dec.html)

That masterpiece was written and first performed in a prisoner-of-war
camp during World War II.

It’s fair to say that Kradjian may have been better prepared than
most to tackle the intense emotions and spiritual reflections behind
this music born in conflict.

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Arrangi ng his way toward Grammy glory

Late last summer, Isabel Bayrakdarian, left, released an album of
songs by Armenian composer Gomidas, recorded by the Armenian Chamber
Orchestra (a program the couple presented live in October at Roy
Thomson Hall with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra).

Bayrakdarian earned a Grammy nomination on Wednesday for her vocal
performance on that album.

All of the orchestral arrangements were by Serouj Kradjian, who came
up with the light-as-air textures through trial and error: "Doing it,
listening to it, learning from my mistakes – learning what I don’t
like, what I like," he says.

Kradjian calls Gomidas’s piano originals "almost minimalist. There
are few notes on the page." So he wanted to be careful not to change
the music’s character. The pianist says it’s important to capture the
"meaning of the music, to give a why you’re orchestrating it.

"There was a temptation to go bigger – symphony orchestra," instead
of chamber, he admits. "I started out, for some songs, to do a bigger
orchestra, but it did not convince me at all because it completely
changed the character."

Gomidas has been rearranged "many times," for string quartet for
example, but Kradjian says these versions are not true to Gomidas’s
compositional spirit.

Kradjian says he works away from the piano most of the time when
arranging or composing, because he can hear the orchestra in his
head. It gives pianists more depth at the keyboard. "I believe it
really contributes to their imagination of sound and what they want
to bring out from a particular piano piece."

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