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.
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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).
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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.
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-dilijan-mansurian-review-20140114