Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Music Review: Dilijan Chamber Reveals Tigran Mansurian's Rebel Side

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Music Review: Dilijan Chamber Reveals Tigran Mansurian's Rebel Side

    MUSIC REVIEW: DILIJAN CHAMBER REVEALS TIGRAN MANSURIAN'S REBEL SIDE

    Los Angeles Times, CA
    Jan14 2014

    Tigran Mansurian's music is refined and sensual. But Dilijan Chamber
    Music divulges there is a feisty rebelliousness beneath the surface.

    By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic

    January 14, 2014, 5:00 a.m.

    The stately, spiritual music of Tigran Mansurian has an underlying
    sadness. But the surfaces remain unflappable, surprisingly fleshy
    and incredibly beautiful. It is music that doesn't so much transcend
    suffering as absorb it, become one with it.

    Luxuriant sensuality as spiritual balm is his secret weapon and no
    doubt what has made the Armenian composer, who turns 75 later this
    month, a stellar international figure.

    Sunday afternoon, though, Dilijan Chamber Music divulged a different
    secret weapon during its Mansurian celebration at the Colburn School's
    Zipper Concert Hall. Underlying the sensuality and deeper even than
    the sadness is a feisty rebelliousness.

    For a tribute concert, the program was a little strange. Of the six
    short Mansurian chamber works (all under 10 minutes), four were from
    his formative years as an Armenian living under Soviet rule. The
    other two were recent solos for clarinet and viola. There was little
    hint of the luminous large-scale scores of his maturity, on which
    his reputation rests.

    PHOTOS: Celebrities by the L.A. Times

    But given that Mansurian, who was on hand at Zipper and who clearly had
    a hand in selecting the program, has been a guiding force in Dilijan
    from the beginning, this was the intention. In remarks from the stage,
    Dilijan music director Movses Pogossian reminded the audience that
    in the last eight years, the series has performed no less than 76
    pieces by Mansurian. UCLA, moreover, will offer a Mansurian tribute
    on Jan. 26, which further fills in the gap.

    Dilijan, instead, offered clues to how Mansurian came to create a
    style grounded on Armenian tradition yet internationally cosmopolitan,
    at once folk-based and revolutionary. Bartok, who did just that
    with Hungarian music, was an obvious model, and Mansurian's earliest
    piece of the afternoon, Allegro Barbaro for violin and piano, took
    its inspiration from Bartok's piano solo of that title.

    At a time when accessible social realism was demanded of Soviet
    composers, Mansurian's brutish percussive Modernism was bold for a
    25-year-old in 1964. Bolder still was Mansurian's 1966 Schoenbergian
    Second Violin Sonata, the first 12-tone Armenian piece.

    How did Mansurian get away with it? The third weapon in his secret
    arsenal was sophisticated refinement. The boldness was in the
    technique, but the actual impression made by these pieces - to
    which Pogossian and pianist Mark Robson brought a commanding focus
    and intensity - is that of a fastidious attention to harmonic detail
    and a singing quality to Mansurian's melodies that no brutality can
    undercut (yet a fourth secret weapon).

    FACES TO WATCH 2014: Theater

    Within the next few years Mansurian became increasingly avant-garde
    but also more nationalistic, incorporating traditional Armenian modes
    and melodies. He also became increasingly adept at covering his radical
    tracks by applying rigorous structure to override sentimentality.

    Madrigal No. 1 - a setting of a tenderly morose Armenian text for
    soprano flute, cello and piano - and the chamber score "Tovem" were
    the works Sunday from the 1970s. In both, a vocal line or flute solo
    might have a sinuously melismatic Armenian flavor yet be constructed
    from rigorously mathematical principles.

    Here, a listener might still be aware of two worlds in opposition. In
    the new pieces, those worlds became one. Armenian clarinetists commonly
    play the folk instrument, the duduk (or gralnet) on the side.

    In Mansurian's 2011 clarinet solo, "Parable," the composer narrows
    in on the common language between the two instruments.

    For "Lotos," a 2012 viola solo, Mansurian's fascination was with the
    molecular structure of the lotus flower, which repels dust. Using an
    Armenian modal structure, he came up with yet another musical parable.

    The fleshy purity of Mansurian's viola writing is such that a writer
    has little hope of attaching an evocative description that will do
    it justice.

    A few more hints at Mansurian's evolution were also offered Sunday,
    with works by two of his Armenian precursors. Three songs by Romanos
    Melikian from early last century were exotically tinged. The Lebanese
    Armenian Boghos Gelalian's "Sept Sequences," (written in the mid-1960s
    and possibly a world premiere) had a Middle Eastern Stravinsky/Varèse
    character and sounded like something Alfred Hitchcock might have
    wanted as a soundtrack for a mystery set in Beirut.

    Dilijan made its own contribution to an afternoon of secret weaponry -
    uniformly terrific performances. The lineup included soprano Shoushik
    Barsoumian, clarinetist Phil O'Connor, violist Robert Brophy, cellist
    Antonio Lysy and conductor Vatsche Barsoumian.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-dilijan-mansurian-review-20140114,0,301019.story#axzz2qP7hK6dj

Working...
X