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Boston Globe, MA
May 27 2008
In season finale, BMOP charts the Armenian experience
Centuries of upheaval have made the Armenian diaspora one of the
world's largest; by some estimates, almost three times as many
Armenians live outside the country as in it. Charting Armenian music
and inspiration, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's season finale,
"Armenia Resounding," balanced perspectives from within and without.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Gil Rose, artistic director
Performing "Armenia Resounding"
At: Jordan Hall, Friday
The late Alan Hovhaness represented the latter; the Somerville-born
composer embraced his Armenian roots early in a prolific, 67-symphony
career tinged with varieties of exotic influence. His three Armenian
Rhapsodies, dating from 1944, adapt folk melodies without much
exegesis. Hovhaness layers melodies among a string orchestra (leavened
by percussion in the first Rhapsody), musical sentences ending in
drones to undergird the next phrase. It's an austere evocation,
distilling a constructed essence of the culture.
By contrast, Vache Sharafyan's "Sinfonia No. 2 un poco concertante," a
BMOP commission and world premiere, takes that essence as its starting
point. Melodies erupt into dense, slow-shifting harmonic clouds; a
repetitive figure builds into crashing waves of multitudinous, Ivesian
dissonance. A solo duduk, the Armenian folk oboe (pre-recorded for
this concert), spins periodic arabesques, the instrument's microtonal
inflections transmuted in the orchestra. Sharafyan creates complex,
deliberate, ultimately captivating grandeur - artistic director Gil
Rose led a terrific, vivid performance.
The program's other commission/premiere came from an Armenian icon,
composer Tigran Mansurian, making the outward gaze literal with "Three
Arias: Sung Out the Window Facing Mount Ararat" the sacred mountain
now, via the vagaries of history, just beyond the Armenian border with
Turkey. Kim Kashkashian's solo viola took eloquent lead, over
delicate, economic orchestral accompaniment. Consistently gentle, even
nostalgic, the music remained content in its poised cinematic
loveliness. Kashkashian was excellent, with not just a ravishing,
singing tone, but a singer's phrasing, the lines as much breathed as
bowed.
Hovhaness's Symphony No. 1, "Exile" - subtitled in reference to
Armenians displaced by the 1915 genocide - was, in fact, the concert's
least Armenian-sounding work. The melodic exoticism seemed more
geographically generic, among evidence of the 25-year-old composer's
as yet unassimilated models: vigorous, rustling strings from Sibelius,
Mussorgsky-like fanfares and modal chorales that would become
Hollywood-epic cliches. But the incisive reading also revealed virtues
Hovhaness would forever rely on: a sturdy orchestrational scaffold, an
uncanny dramatic pace, a transcendental faith in the power of his
unadorned musical materials.
Rose and company plan more Hovhaness in advance of the composer's 2011
centenary; Friday's performance proved them ideal guides for that
magical mystery tour.
May 27 2008
In season finale, BMOP charts the Armenian experience
Centuries of upheaval have made the Armenian diaspora one of the
world's largest; by some estimates, almost three times as many
Armenians live outside the country as in it. Charting Armenian music
and inspiration, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's season finale,
"Armenia Resounding," balanced perspectives from within and without.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Gil Rose, artistic director
Performing "Armenia Resounding"
At: Jordan Hall, Friday
The late Alan Hovhaness represented the latter; the Somerville-born
composer embraced his Armenian roots early in a prolific, 67-symphony
career tinged with varieties of exotic influence. His three Armenian
Rhapsodies, dating from 1944, adapt folk melodies without much
exegesis. Hovhaness layers melodies among a string orchestra (leavened
by percussion in the first Rhapsody), musical sentences ending in
drones to undergird the next phrase. It's an austere evocation,
distilling a constructed essence of the culture.
By contrast, Vache Sharafyan's "Sinfonia No. 2 un poco concertante," a
BMOP commission and world premiere, takes that essence as its starting
point. Melodies erupt into dense, slow-shifting harmonic clouds; a
repetitive figure builds into crashing waves of multitudinous, Ivesian
dissonance. A solo duduk, the Armenian folk oboe (pre-recorded for
this concert), spins periodic arabesques, the instrument's microtonal
inflections transmuted in the orchestra. Sharafyan creates complex,
deliberate, ultimately captivating grandeur - artistic director Gil
Rose led a terrific, vivid performance.
The program's other commission/premiere came from an Armenian icon,
composer Tigran Mansurian, making the outward gaze literal with "Three
Arias: Sung Out the Window Facing Mount Ararat" the sacred mountain
now, via the vagaries of history, just beyond the Armenian border with
Turkey. Kim Kashkashian's solo viola took eloquent lead, over
delicate, economic orchestral accompaniment. Consistently gentle, even
nostalgic, the music remained content in its poised cinematic
loveliness. Kashkashian was excellent, with not just a ravishing,
singing tone, but a singer's phrasing, the lines as much breathed as
bowed.
Hovhaness's Symphony No. 1, "Exile" - subtitled in reference to
Armenians displaced by the 1915 genocide - was, in fact, the concert's
least Armenian-sounding work. The melodic exoticism seemed more
geographically generic, among evidence of the 25-year-old composer's
as yet unassimilated models: vigorous, rustling strings from Sibelius,
Mussorgsky-like fanfares and modal chorales that would become
Hollywood-epic cliches. But the incisive reading also revealed virtues
Hovhaness would forever rely on: a sturdy orchestrational scaffold, an
uncanny dramatic pace, a transcendental faith in the power of his
unadorned musical materials.
Rose and company plan more Hovhaness in advance of the composer's 2011
centenary; Friday's performance proved them ideal guides for that
magical mystery tour.