The Gurdjieff Ensemble, Levon Eskenian

On Komitas the Armenian Gurdjieff Ensemble, directed by Levon Eskenian, turns to the music of Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935). Priest, singer, composer and collector of folk song, Komitas is held to be the father of modern Armenian music. Eskenian takes melodies that Komitas wrote down for piano or choir and gives them back to the folk instruments that first carried them.

Eskenian founded the ensemble to play the Gurdjieff and de Hartmann piano music in arrangements faithful to its sources. Their ECM debut, Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff, won an Edison Award in 2012. Manfred Eicher then urged Eskenian toward an Armenian folk and sacred programme. Ten musicians play duduk, zurna, pogh flute, kamancha, oud, tar, santur, kanun and a range of drums, among them Emmanuel Hovhannisyan and Vladimir Papikyan. The recording was made in February 2015 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Markus Heiland as engineer.

The eighteen tracks move between work songs, lullabies, love songs and dances, and between village and church. As a collector, Komitas traced the ties that bind Armenian sacred and secular music, and the arrangements keep both close. At the centre are the Yot Par, seven dances that Komitas wrote for piano, named after Vagharshapat, Shushi, Yerevan and Karin. Here they become small duets and trios for winds, strings and drums. Msho Shoror, a piano work of almost twelve minutes, is newly arranged for zurna, santur and the full group. On Havun two duduks carry a song heard as a metaphor for Christ's Resurrection.

In the Independent on Sunday, Phil Johnson called it a "landmark recording" and found the ensemble's sounds "startlingly strange and beautiful". Thomas Rothschild in Faust-Kultur described music hardly known in western Europe, as strange as it is catchy. He thought it could become a cult, like the man who gave the ensemble its name. The booklet carries a note by Tigran Mansurian, who calls Komitas's piano pieces documentary works. ECM planned a companion album of Komitas's piano music, played by Lusine Grigoryan, for the following year.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2451, first released in October 2015, with notes by Eskenian and Mansurian.