Piano Music (Armenian) - KARA-MURZA, K. / KORGANOV, G. / MELIKIAN, R. (Secrets of Armenia) (Y. Ayrapetyan)
The music in this collection reflects the spirit of Armenia through dances and songs that have their origins in scenes from everyday Armenian life. Korganov’s pictorial Bayati is an especially vivid representation, while Kara-Murza’s Pot-pourri sur des airs arméniens is a significant work, combining Armenian folk music with the Western piano tradition. Melikian’s Emeralds is one of his famous cycles of romances, hallmarked by a strong sense of poetic narrative and a vivid emotional expressiveness. This album of Armenian piano discoveries is played by Yulia Ayrapetyan, a specialist in the music of Armenia.
Komitas: Songs (arr. V. Sargsyan for piano)
Komitas was a priest, a musician and a pioneer of ethnomusicology, considered to be the founder of the Armenian national school of music.
A significant part of his life was taken up with travel to remote villages, collecting thousands of traditional songs. These range from simple melodies and poetic sketches of Armenian landscapes, to dramatic lyrics expressing mournful tragedy. Komitas was enthralled by the way ‘a peasant learns this art in nature’s embrace, with nature as his infallible school.’
Heard here in world première recordings, these idiomatic arrangements by Villy Sargsyan importantly preserve the composer’s modal-intonational system.
David Denton David’s Review Corner,
February 2022
Born in Turkey in 1869, but moving with his family to Armenia when he was twelve, Komitas became one of the nation’s foremost composers in the early 20th century. Having been musically educated in Berlin, he was to live an eventful and almost nomadic life collecting folk songs on his travels through Armenia, Persia and Turkey, usually notating them on a single line of music for further use.
That he would explore that avenue of use to form complex scores, his many years of collection still left on his death, in 1935, a vast quantity where only the vocal line exists, and there were also those where he had simply added a basic piano accompaniment.
This, the second disc of his music to appear on the Grand Piano label, the opposite route with songs taken back to basic piano arrangements, a task that has been undertaken by the Russian pianist and pedagogue, Villy Sargsyan. Thirty-five are included on this disc performed by the Russian-born pianist, Yulia Ayrapetyan, her busy career using the United States as her base for international concert tours. The tracks are mostly of cameo length, some little more than a few seconds.
The music of no great technical difficulty but pleasing to hear. Recorded in the Great Hall of Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 2019 and 2021.
© 2022 David’s Review Corner
Spendiarov: Complete Piano Works and Chamber Works with Piano
Alexander Spendiarov (1871–1928) was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and a close friend of Glazunov who wrote that he was a ‘musician with an impeccable, widely versatile technique’.
Spendiarov’s music combines Russian and Armenian elements and is saturated in folkloric influence—and he vitally enriched the expressive range of Armenian music as a composer, pedagogue and champion of his contemporaries.
His piano works, both for solo instrument and for chamber forces, show the range of his gifts, not least his romances and lullabies, and range across his entire compositional life.
Spendiarov’s songs, heard here in piano transcriptions by Villy Sargsyan, perfectly preserve the unique timbres and textures of these works.
Rob Barnett
MusicWeb International,
April 2021
Grand Piano continue their strong Armenian line. Grand Piano continue their strong Armenian line with no sign of fatigue. While they have pianists of the calibre of Mikael Ayrapetyan at their bidding may they long persevere with music from this neglected treasury.