Boston Globe, MA
Feb 13 2005

Nominees have ties to Boston and the past
Up for Grammys: local artists and music with roots
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

The nominations for classical Grammys used to be predictable — big
stars performing standard repertoire for the megalabels. For several
years, however, they have reflected changes in the industry: Now you
are as likely to see nominees that feature little-known repertoire
on independent or budget labels, played by exemplary musicians who
aren’t necessarily celebrities.

The current nominations draw attention to releases the general
music-loving public might not have encountered. That is certainly
true of two discs with strong Boston connections that appear
alongside Andre Previn’s Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie” with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer and featuring his wife,
Anne-Sophie Mutter, as superstar soloist.

A Naxos disc in the Milken Archive series of American Jewish music,
“The Mirror,” which contains music by Boston composer Yehudi Wyner,
was nominated in two categories, producer of the year (David Frost)
and best small ensemble. In the producer category, Frost is up against
Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM records, and one of the records that won
him his nomination was a two-CD set, “Monodia,” music by the Armenian
composer Tigran Mansurian. “Monodia” was also nominated in the best
instrumental soloist category, where New England Conservatory faculty
violist Kim Kashkashian finds herself competing against Mutter. The
recording also chalked up a third nomination, in best classical
composition, where it is up against Previn’s concerto. Small world.

Wyner, 75, whose piano concerto receives its world premiere at the
Boston Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 17, is the son of Lazar Weiner,
the preeminent composer of Yiddish art song. The Naxos disc collects
three of his works on specifically Jewish subjects.

The title piece, “The Mirror,” comes from incidental music that
Wyner wrote in 1973 for a Yale Repertory Theatre production of a
play by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The play is about village life in
one of the small Jewish communities in Eastern Europe more than a
century ago. It is not an exercise in nostalgia for a vanished world,
though; it concerns institutionalized sexual repression, fantasy, and
demonology. The 13 short movements, arranged for concert performance,
are scored for a traditional Yiddish theater ensemble of four players;
there are also some songs, one of them charmingly sung by the composer,
as well as a bit of spoken narration.

This is appealing “roots” music, surveying idioms of the play’s
time and place, but not reproducing them. Singer’s play comes
from a deliberately skewed point of view, from a different time
and place. In his music, Wyner achieves a complementary tone and
texture: affectionate, critical, mystified, funny, and a little
terrifying. The klezmer clarinet part is played with virtuoso
abandon by Richard Stoltzman, and the prominent violin part is in
the capable and idiomatic hands of Daniel Stepner; Robert Schulz is
the percussionist. They are all prominent Boston-based players.

The disc is completed by “Passover Offering” (1959) and, from 1981,
“Tants un Maysele” (“Dance and Little Story”), both of them works
without irony or commentary, using traditional gestures but stretched
into a more contemporary harmonic language. The excellent performers
come from all over; the locals include cellist Ronald Thomas,
clarinetist Bruce Creditor, and, at the piano, the composer himself.

Mansurian, 66, is a leading Armenian composer. Like Wyner’s, his
is roots music, and Mansurian writes, “I’ve always tried to compose
works I myself can love.”

Mansurian has enjoyed a long association with Kashkashian, which
resulted in an earlier ECM CD (“Hayren”), and in the three works
composed for her on this disc: the concerto for viola and strings “.
. . and then I was in time again” (1995), “Lachrymae” (1999), and
“Confessing With Faith” (1998).

The work specifically nominated for the Grammy is the concerto;
the title comes from a phrase in William Faulkner’s novel “The
Sound and the Fury.” The 20-minute piece flowers out of an opening
gesture of five repeated notes. The music is melancholy, meditative,
and haunting; the style suggests the timelessness of Arvo Paert,
but with more density, intensity, and depth. There is dialogue of
several kinds between soloist and ensemble, but the viola dominates,
because to the soloist Mansurian entrusts highly personal questioning,
exploration, and reflection. Kashkashian plays with total instrumental
mastery and a harrowing emotional involvement. Christoph Poppen leads
the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

“Lachrymae” (“Tears”) is an eloquent duet for viola and saxophone,
instruments that share range with complementary timbres (Jan
Garbarek is the sophisticated saxophonist). “Confessing With Faith”
is a setting of seven prayers by a 12th-century Armenian saint,
Nerses. The Hilliard Ensemble intones them with simplicity and
sophistication; the viola part is both an extra, wide-ranging voice in
the ensemble, and a narrator/commentator like the Evangelist in a Bach
Passion. Filling out the disc is an earlier concerto for violin (1981)
that is more traditional; Leonidas Kavakosis the assured soloist.

Whether either of these recordings wins a Grammy or whether they
knock each other out of contention doesn’t really matter. Those who
discover them will find a bit of themselves there, for in exploring
the roots of others we gain new perspectives on our own.

The Toronto Sun, Canada
February 12, 2005 Saturday
EARLY EDITION

BOXERS IN TOUGH

MONTREAL

Canadian boxers Joachim Alcine of Montreal and Ian Gardner of Saint
John, N.B., both face tough ring tasks today.

Alcine (21-0) takes on hard-hitting Mexican Carlos Bojorquez (23-6-6)
in the feature 12-round match on an afternoon card at the Montreal
Casino. Two minor belts are on the line — Alcine’s NABA title and
the vacant WBC International title.

Gardner (18-1) faces Armenian-born German Arthur Abraham (14-0) at Max
Schmelling Hall in Berlin for the WBA International middleweight title.

ARMENIAN NEW CONSTITUTION NOT TO BAN DUAL CITIZENSHIP

PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2004

12.02.2005 14:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ There will be no item in the new Constitution of
Armenia, banning dual citizenship, stated Head of the Armenian National
Assembly Commission on State and Legal Issues Rafik Petrosian. He
emphasized that the draft of constitutional reforms says a special
law will regulate dual citizenship questions. It should be noted
that the referendum on constitutional reforms in Armenia is planned
at the beginning of summer 2005.

PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2004

FRENCH PARLIAMENT LEADER TO VISIT ARMENIA

12.02.2005 13:01

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ French Parliament leader Jean Louis Debre will
visit Armenia. The agreement on that was reached in the course of
a telephone conversation of Jean Louis Debre and Chairman of the
National Assembly of Armenia Artur Baghdasarian. The Armenian Speaker
thanked his French counterpart for raising the Armenian Genocide issue
in the course of his official visit to Turkey. Debre emphasized that
when speaking of the Armenian Genocide during the meetings with the
Turkish President and Prime Minister he emphasized the importance of
restoration of the historic justice.

Genocide Edited Out After Turkish Pressure
by: Clare Chapman

The Times Educational Supplement
February 11, 2005

Hundreds of history books have been recalled from German schools
after the state of Brandenburg agreed to remove a reference to the
“Armenian genocide” of 1915 following pressure from Turkey, which
refuses to acknowledge that it took place.

A reference to the genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians were
deported and murdered by the government of the Young Turks in
1915-1916, was included in history books in the east German state
in 2002.

Brandenburg was the first state to refer to this lesser-known genocide.

Turkey, which, until human rights reforms two years ago, threatened
to imprison anyone who said the genocide took place, has fought to
have the passage removed.

The cause of the dispute was the following sentence: “Disengagement
from war; extermination and genocide (for example the genocide against
the Armenian population of Asia Minor)”.

Thomas Hainz, regional education ministry spokesman, admitted the
ministry had removed the line from textbooks because of “international
diplomatic resentment”.

But he said that it had been “an independent decision”. He said
reducing the discussion of genocide to just one sentence involving
just one case “does not do the topic justice”.

The education ministry is now working on a new chapter that covers
genocide in a more “comprehensive context”.

Necmettin Altuntas, the Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin, denied
any pressure had been put on the education ministry. “We wanted the
reference to be taken out of the school books because it was stated
as fact.”

He said many historians believe using the term genocide to des-cribe
what happened is incorrect. “Turkey does not deny that something
happened, but we have not been able to come to the conclusion that
it was a massacre.”

The move has angered historians. Micha Brumlik, director of the
Frankfurt Fritz Bauer Institute that deals with Holocaust history,
condemned the decision, saying there are “two political scandals”
involved.

One concerned Turkey, which for years refused to accept general human
rights standards and continued to deny responsibility for the genocide
of 1915. But the second concerned Germany and was far more serious.

“The authorities in Brandenburg have bowed to pressure from
diplomats. I find that shocking for our country,” Brumlik said.

Sven Petke, Christian Democratic Union general secretary, said he
now fears that “the propaganda ministry in Ankara” is dictating the
local curriculum.

IN THE OVERGROWN BEIRUT MARSHALLING YARDS, THE TRACKS ARE STILL
by ROBERT FISK

The Independent (London)
February 12, 2005, Saturday

THE IRRESISTIBLE ROMANCE OF A STEAM TRAIN SCARRED WITH THE BULLET
HOLES OF BATTLE;

With a spare hour on my hands before lunch in Lebanon this week, I
revisited the joys of my childhood, crunched my way across the old
Beirut marshalling yards and climbed aboard a wonderful 19th-century
rack-and- pinion railway locomotive. Although scarred by bullets, the
green paint on the wonderful old Swiss loco still reflects the
glories of steam and of the Ottoman empire.

For it was the Ottomans who decided to adorn their jewel of Beirut
with the latest state-of-the-art locomotive, a train which once
carried the German Kaiser up the mountains above the city where, at a
small station called Sofar, the Christian community begged for his
protection from the Muslims. “We are a minority,” they cried, to
which the Kaiser bellowed: “Then become Muslims!”

But that is another story. The locos went on chuffing up the
mountains until 1975 when the Lebanese civil war destroyed many of
the trains and much of the permanent way. Up in the Lebanese port of
Tripoli, there are some far bigger 0-8-0s (the configuration of steam
locomotive wheels), engines which were installed to pull trains
between the Lebanese seaport and the Syrian city of Hama. They, too,
are perforated by bullets – they had formed part of the Palestinian
front line against Syrian troops in 1983 – and their oil is still
bleeding from their gaskets.

When first I discovered them, I was in contact with that renowned
expert on Middle East steam, Rabbi Walter Rothschild of Leeds, who
immediately told me their story. They had originally belonged to the
pre-First World War Reichbahn and had been handed over to the French
as part of post- war Versailles reparations. The French Middle East
mandate had just been created and Paris sent their German gifts to
operate out of Lebanon. So these great steam behemoths, which once
pulled the middle classes of Germany from Berlin to Danzig, ended up
in a north Lebanese railway junkyard.

All my life, I have been fascinated by trains. My mother used to take
me down to Maidstone East station in Kent to watch the tank engines
pull their local trains in from Ashford or the old Second World War
Super Austerity class steamers – big, ugly beasts with a firebox the
shape of a squashed toilet roll – with a mile of rusting trucks in
tow.

Sometimes, she would take me one station down the line to Bearsted
where my father would be playing golf, the compartment – we travelled
first class – filling with smoke in the tunnel beneath Maidstone
prison, the old black-out curtains banging against the windows. For
days, I would stand on the platform of Tonbridge station and watch
the Battle of Britain class locos and the Merchant Navy class and the
Schools class (from which, I would later note, my own minor public
school, Sutton Valence, was rigorously excluded) as they pummelled
through with boat trains to Victoria or Dover.

The Golden Arrow, in those pre-Eurostar days, was the joy of every
loco- spotter, its cream and gold carriages hauled by an engine with
the British and French flags snapping from the boiler. We all held
that train lovers’ bible in our hands, Ian Allen’s loco-spotter’s
guide to engine numbers.

I used to think all this was a fetish until I realised how deeply the
railway system had permeated art. Turner was obsessed with trains.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina falls in love on a train journey, decides to
leave her husband on a railway platform and commits suicide by
throwing herself in front of a goods train. “And exactly at the
moment when the space between the wheels drew level with her … and
with a light movement, as though she would rise again at once, sank
on to her knees … something huge and relentless struck her on the
head and dragged her down on her back. God forgive me everything!’
she murmured.” Tolstoy even died in a railway station.

Part of Doctor Zhivago revolves around his flight from Moscow by
rail, his sight of Strelnikov’s revolutionary locomotive and his
subsequent trek back to Lara down a partially snow-covered track. The
film’s treatment of this is not as good as the book’s, where a female
barber warns Zhivago that he risks arrest with “all this talk of
special trains”.

The point, of course, was that all trains were “special”. My mother
took early colour film of 10-year-old Robert watching the big cream
and red “Trans Europe Express” – a diesel-hauled all-first-class
train – sliding into Freiburg station in Germany in 1956. But equally
special was a wind- up model steam loco which my father brought me
back from Germany where he had been aiding the post-war
reconstruction of Hamburg. Being German, it was so powerful that it
once flew off its English Hornby tracks, raced across the front hall
carpet, jumped the front door step of our home and struck out across
the drive, coming to rest under my father’s car.

When the Lebanese authorities briefly restored the coastal line from
east Beirut to the Crusader port of Byblos, I travelled its length in
the driving cab of a big Polish diesel. It pulled just one wooden
carriage – an import from the British empire’s Indian empire after
the 1914-18 war – and travelled at no more than 15 miles per hour
because the Lebanese, being Lebanese, insisted on parking their cars
on the track when they went swimming.

Despite the great liners of the world and the growth of air power,
leaders – especially dictators – loved trains. Hitler had his own
luxurious train, complete with mobile flak batteries. So did Goering,
and so did Himmler. And Tito. Soviet commissars loved trains. And
trains, of course, became accessories to murder. Turkish railways
carried thousands of Armenians to their places of massacre. European
trains carried millions of Jews and gypsies to their annihilation.
The steam train whistle which permeates D H Lawrence’s Sons and
Lovers had a quite different connotation as it drifted over the
snowfields around Auschwitz.

Somehow, airports never captured the magic of railway stations. Name
me an air version of Saint Pancras or the Gare du Nord or Grand
Central. But it was years before I grasped – I think – just what the
fascination of trains involves. It’s about the track, the rails, the
permanent way as much as the locomotives. At Edinburgh Waverley, you
can look at the twin rails and know that, with points and unwelded
track and occasional changes of width, those minutely shaped ramrods
of iron stretch unbroken from Scotland via the Channel Tunnel to
Turkey or Saint Petersburg or Vladivostok or – save for the Iraqi
insurgents who keep blowing up the permanent way – to Baghdad.

I suspect this sense of continuity appeals to us. An airliner might
fly a route but never through the same stretch of air. Nor does a
ship pass through exactly the same waters each voyage. But the train
will always travel – to an inch – along precisely the same journey as
it took yesterday or a hundred years ago, the same journey which it
will take next week and in a hundred years.

In the overgrown Beirut marshalling yards, the tracks are still
visible, maintaining a ghostly continuum with the past, reminding us
of the permanence of history and power and – in its worst performance
of industrialised murder – of death. Which is why, I suppose, trains
capture our imagination and fear from childhood to old age.

TURKISH LOBBY IN US KEEPS SETTING CONGRESSMEN AGAINST ARMENIANS

PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2005

12.02.2005 13:14

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ In the words of Congressmen supporting Turkey, who
wished to remain unknown, the Armenian lobby shows initiative for the
US Congress to pass a respective decision on the 90-th anniversary of
the Armenian Genocide, “however the White house will again come against
such a decision.” “We make every effort to convince our colleagues to
come against the Armenian initiative, as well as to note the importance
of the relations with Turkey for the US,” the Congressmen stated.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Feb 12 2005

INDIAN COMPANIES ENGAGED IN GOLD MINING IN OCCUPIED TERRITORIES OF
AZERBAIJAN, INDIAN AMBASSADOR SAYS
[February 12, 2005, 20:14:56]

The Indian companies are engaged in development of gold mines in the
Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan occupied by the Armenians aggressors.
Ambassador of India to the Azerbaijan Republic Jyoti Svarup Pande
confirmed the fact.

It became possible after establishment of contact with the Indian
embassy in Armenia, the Ambassador noted.

The Ambassador also said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India
and the Indian Embassy in Armenia have already warned the Indian gold
miners that they are working in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

REPRESENTATIVES OF AZERBAIJAN DIASPORA MET PACE CO-RAPPORTEUR ON AZERBAIJAN
[February 12, 2005, 20:40:53]

AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Feb 12 2005

Head of the Estonia-Azerbaijan Center of Culture “Aydin” functioning
in Estonia Niyazi Hajiyev, and the deputy of parliament of Estonia,
chairman of Estonia-Azerbaijan inter-parliamentary friendship group
Eldar Efendiyev have met with the co-rapporteur of the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe on Azerbaijan, Member of Estonian
Parliament Andres Herkel before his visit to Azerbaijan.

The goal of meeting consisted in bringing up to his attention of the
truth about Azerbaijan and rendering assistance to him to take more
objective position.

During the meeting, the co-rapporteur was told of the historical roots
of the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, its reason,
hard conditions in which appeared more than one million of refugees
and IDPs as a result of the Armenian aggression. Also was marked the
purposeful activity of the organizations of the Azerbaijan Diaspora
and the State Committee on Work with the Azerbaijanis Living in
Foreign Countries, directed on integration of the Country into Europe.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Foreign Minister Wraps Up Visit to Turkey

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Feb 12 2005

AssA-Irada 12/02/2005 17:46

Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov wrapped up his two-day visit to
Turkey on Friday.

On the last day of the visit, Mammadyarov met with Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan to discuss relations between the two
countries, prospects for settling the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict
over Nagorno Karabakh and the situation in the South Caucasus region.

On Thursday, Mammadyarov met with Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer,
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc.