PERFORMANCE

January 22, 2012       Saint Florent-le-Vieil, France  http://bit.ly/u1YjPZ

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

PRESS

 

The Guardian, Michael Church, Friday 22 April 2011

 

Komitas Vardapet – Forgotten Folk Hero

Composer Komitas Vardapet survived a genocide and somehow bridged
Armenia and Turkey's musical divide.    He should be better known.

 

Armenia's champion – detail of a painting of Komitas Vardapet by Sarkis Muradyan.
Photograph:  RIA Novosti/Lebrecht Music & Art

 

Sunday 24 April is Easter Day, but for Armenians it is also genocide remembrance day. This is when Armenians all over the world will gather to commemorate the anniversary of the 1915 genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey were either slaughtered, or died on forced marches into exile. For Armenians, music is memory. And whenever they gather to honour their dead, the songs they sing are by the composer who speaks for the soul of their nation, Komitas Vardapet. He himself was a victim of the 1915 persecution, and though he survived physically, he was driven into madness by it. Outside Armenia he, too, has been swept under the carpet of history.

 

Komitas's output was modest: 80 choral works and songs, arrangements of the Armenian mass, and some dances for piano. But as his better-known compatriot Aram Khachaturian acknowledged, he singlehandedly laid the foundations for Armenia's classical tradition. And as a collector and arranger of folksongs, he did for Armenia what Bartók did for Hungary, turning simple material into bewitchingly sophisticated polyphony. After a Komitas concert in Paris, Claude Debussy declared that on the basis of a single song, he deserved to be recognised as a great composer. Yet many classical musicians barely recognise his name.

 

I first became aware of Komitas's existence when recording the Armenian Chamber Choir in Yerevan in 2001. I was intrigued by the songs' vibrant strangeness: folk melodies so deftly arranged that the raw beauty of the originals glowed the more brightly…..more on Komitas