‘Ars Poetica’
National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: Day to Day 1:00 PM EST
July 27, 2006 Thursday
ANCHORS: NOAH ADAMS
REPORTERS: DAVID WAS
Our contributor, David Was, half of the band Was, Not Was, usually
writes about jazz and pop music. But he was intrigued by a new CD
featuring music sung by a chamber choir. Here is David.
DAVID WAS reporting:
Munich-based ECM Records has been known for 37 years now as a
repository of taste-making jazz, from Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny
to a host of European musicians with half their hearts lodged in
so-called serious music.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: Some 20 years ago, label founder and producer Manfred Eicher
started his new series, Imprint, which is devoted to contemporary
classical composition.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: His latest offering is an a cappella choral work by Armenia
composer Tigran Mansurian, whose love of his native language led him
to set the poems of Yeghishe Charents, arguably the most beloved of
20th-century Armenian poets, to music.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: The result is a fluid, intimate and sensuous-sounding blend of
the ancient and the modern, as if medieval monks got in a time machine
and launched themselves into the 21st century. That feeling is at
once a function of Charents’ poetic sensibility and the facility of
the Armenia Chamber Chorus to express the ineffable emotions therein.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: Charents was an early supporter of the Bolsheviks, but he was
persecuted during the Stalin purges for the nationalist sentiments
reflected in his poems, especially the one titled The Message, whose
famous acrostic written in the second letter of each line reads, Oh
Armenian people, your only salvation is in your collective power. As
a result of this message, he was jailed in 1936, and witnesses say
that he died in his cell the following year.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: The legacy of Charents and his works now stand proudly and
firmly within the canon of Armenian literature. Many of his words and
thoughts have become national slogans and emblems of Armenian unity,
even to the extent that they’ve been printed on official government
documents, in nationalistic support of that cause.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
WAS: Broad to vivid life by Mansurian’s haunting music, perhaps the
world will come to discover one of the great voices in 20th-century
poetry. The consonant-rich sounds of the Armenian language may have
been challenging to set to music, but Mansurian considered that the
virtue, rather than a limitation. As Charents wrote in one of his
poems, our language is subtle and rough, courageous and harsh, but
at the same time our language is as radiant as a lighthouse glowing
with the fire of ancient centuries.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)
CHADWICK: The music is from the album Ars Poetica by the composer
Tigran Mansurian. Our reviewer, David Was.
(Soundbite of Armenian choral music)