Kim Kashkashian, Robyn Schulkowsky, Tigran Mansurian

Hayren is the album with which Kim Kashkashian brought the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian to ECM New Series, and with him the music of Komitas. Two Mansurian works for viola and percussion, in their first recordings, frame a sequence of his arrangements of Komitas songs. The result traces a single line from Armenian folk and sacred melody to a contemporary chamber language.

Kashkashian plays viola, Robyn Schulkowsky percussion, and Mansurian himself plays piano and sings. Both of his pieces date from 1998 and were written for Kashkashian and Schulkowsky. The disc was recorded in May 2000 at Teldec Studio in Berlin, produced by Manfred Eicher with Peter Laenger as engineer, and released in 2003. Mansurian, born in Beirut in 1939 and based in Yerevan, contributes his own notes to the booklet, alongside an essay by Steve Lake. Komitas (1869-1935) was a priest, composer and collector of folk songs, revered by Armenians as their nation's greatest songwriter. He was arrested by the Ottoman authorities in 1915.

The opener, Havik, is a short, lyrical duo in which the viola seems close to losing its footing over the percussion. The Komitas pieces follow in changing scorings, from solo piano to the full trio: Krunk appears three times, Oror twice, and Antuni is the longest of the songs. Mansurian sings in a near-whisper, an untrained, quavering voice that reviewers valued for its expressiveness rather than its technique. The closing Duet for viola and percussion lasts over eighteen minutes, a more abstract piece in which marimba and gongs shape the viola's long lines.

In The Independent, Andrew Clarke described a haunting disc "aglow with echoes of a distant but living tradition". Greg Cahill wrote in Strings of "this untapped musical realm where the ancient and the modern coexist with such grace". In Die Zeit, Konrad Heidkamp called it one of the greatest small productions of recent years. The title word, as the Frankfurter Rundschau explained, names a poetic style in Armenia closely tied to the melody of the language.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1754, first released in 2003, in a slipcase with a 44-page booklet.