An emotional link to a nation’s past

The Boston Globe
November 29, 2009

Armenian composer’s powerful music brings trio of collaborators together
By David Weininger, Globe Correspondent | November 29, 2009
The violist Kim Kashkashian has been a muse for several important
composers, having worked with and elicited new music from Luciano
Berio, György Kurtág, and Arvo Pärt, among many others. But her
bond with Tigran Mansurian is different. They are marking more than
two decades of collaboration with a rare series of American concerts
with percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. The brief tour – in which
Mansurian will play piano and sing – begins Tuesday at Jordan Hall.
Their program includes music by Mansurian as well as his arrangements
of songs by Komitas Vartabed, the composer and musicologist who is
widely regarded as a pivotal figure in Armenian classical
music. Before he was arrested
and deported in 1915, Komitas (the name is sometimes written Gomidas)
spent years traveling the countryside, notating and arranging
thousands of the folk and religious songs he heard. Both Kashkashian
and Mansurian are of Armenian descent, and it was those songs – an
invaluable link to the country’s history – that brought the two
together.
Speaking by phone, Kashkashian recalls playing some arrangements of
Komitas’s songs in the late 1980s; to get what she calls `a more or
less original take on them,” she traveled to Armenia to
hear Mansurian play and sing them. The encounter was transformative.
`I was so entranced by what he was doing,” she says. `It was so
powerful, so potent that I took a little tape recording of the event
with me to Munich,” the home of ECM Records, Kashkashian’s
label. There she played the tape for two colleagues: Manfred Eicher,
ECM’s founder, and Schulkowsky, with whom Kashkashian worked
frequently.
`And we sat there, all of us, with tears in our eyes,” the violist
remembers. `Because it was so spectacular and for us something
intimate and powerful and unique. And at that time we said,
`We’ve got to do something about this.’ ”
What resulted was a 2003 recording called `Hayren,” in which the trio
played Komitas’s arrangements and Mansurian’s own works. On the
recording, Mansurian’s voice sounds raw and almost painfully
constricted, a world away from what you would expect from a trained
singer. It’s unusual enough that in the program he’s credited with
`vocals” instead of =80=9Csinging.” But the appeal, says
Kashkashian, lies in
something deeper.
`The rawness which you hear, and the unpracticed quality, really let
through the incredible depth of emotion and knowledge of the people,
of the land, of the circumstances of the nation – its blood,”
she says. `I really believe that it’s something that needs
to be heard.”
What Komitas did was to bring the ancient past into a form that modern
Armenians – and Westerners – could understand and embrace. In a way,
Kashkashian says, Mansurian’s own music does the same thing. `We talk
about him as a contemporary European-trained composer with all those
techniques at his disposal,” she explains. `But we’re also talking
about him as being rooted in the Armenian church and
folk music of the past. So when I hear a piece of Tigran’s, I get both
things. It’s like a red thread that goes through all his music.”
Tuesday’s concert opens with three Taghs, ancient religious chants
that Mansurian has fashioned for viola and percussion. Also on the
program
are two groups of Komitas’s songs, four of Mansurian’s own
songs transcribed for viola and piano, and a lengthy duet for
Kashkashian and Schulkowsky. `You notice how everything feeds on
everything else,” Kashkashian says. `You definitely sense the flavor
of the nation, the flavor of the geography, both emotional and
physical, in all the works – in the ones that were written two years
ago as well as the ones that were a couple centuries ago.”
If that’s the case, it will be due not only to Komitas and Mansurian
but also to Kashkashian’s unique voice. Over the course of her career
she has created an uncommonly expressive tone – shadowy yet lyrical –
from the most introverted of string instruments. It’s most clearly
evident in her two most recent recordings: `Asturiana,” a 2007
collection of song transcriptions with Robert Levin, and
=80=9CNeharot,” a diverse, darkly beautiful collection of
orchestral and chamber music released earlier this year.
Asked about her tone, Kashkashian is modest to a fault, preferring to
frame her explanation in universal terms.
`The thing that any musician is trying to do is to take the expressive
tool offered them and say something that is, on the one hand, as true
to the composer as possible, and on the other, that expresses the
deepest, innermost regions of their own hearts. It just takes a great
deal of objectivity and an unbelievable amount of vulnerability and
courage to open yourself. And to do those two things together, and to
keep some truth in the affair – it’s not easy. But I think that’s what
all of us are striving for.”
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