Music in Time of War
Debussy: 12 Etudes; Chansons de Bilitis; En blanc et noir etc; Komitas: Armenian Dances for piano; Armenian Songs
Kirill Gerstein (piano) et al
Myrios MYR905 141 mins (2 discs)
Why tie these composers together? They greatly admired each other’s work, but their respective oeuvres could not have been more different. For Kirill Gerstein, the connecting link is the fact that both were emotionally shattered by the implosion of their worlds; for Debussy by the First World War, and for Komitas by the Armenian Genocide.
The Debussyan side of this collection mixes the familiar with music that is seldom performed. Notable here are the two-piano version of En blanc et noir, for which Gerstein drafts in Thomas Adès as co-pianist, and some other late pieces which would have pointed in new directions, had the composer not been felled by cancer – the tentative Elégie and the Étude retrouvée are prime examples.
But the real thrust of this album lies in its championing of Armenia’s musical patron saint Komitas Vardapet, who single-handedly founded an Armenian musical tradition through collecting his country’s folk songs, and making choral and instrumental magic out of them. Komitas wrote very few piano pieces, and Gerstein plays them with love. But they are defiantly thin in texture: it’s only with Komitas’s folk-song settings that we get a sense of his magic, thanks to the beauty and heart-rending power of Ruzan Mantashyan’s performances.
Gerstein spent the pandemic modestly chairing online debates in which other artists held the floor; in this attached booklet he prints essays by leading musicologists giving the background to Komitas’s heroic
– and ultimately tragic – life and work. But something vital is lacking here: to get the full force of the songs we need translations of their lyrics. Myrios should send these out via a link to their website. At present they are missing a trick.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★