Lusine Grigoryan

Seven Songs is a solo piano album devoted entirely to Komitas (1869-1935), the priest, ethnomusicologist and composer regarded as the founder of modern Armenian art music. The Armenian pianist Lusine Grigoryan plays his folk-based miniatures with an ear for the village instruments behind them. The album stands on its own, but it also forms a companion to the Gurdjieff Ensemble's Komitas (ECM New Series 2451), which came from the same sessions.

Grigoryan was born in Gyumri and studied at the Yerevan State Komitas Conservatory, where she also researched folk music interpretation in Komitas and Bartók. The recording, her ECM debut, was made in February 2015 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano. Manfred Eicher produced it, with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister. The booklet carries an introduction to Komitas by Paul Griffiths and notes by the pianist on each set.

The Seven Songs that open the album are the cycle Yot Yerg, written in Constantinople in 1911. At the centre is Msho Shoror, a ten-minute dance sequence in seven parts built on the shoror, a swaying round dance. In her notes Grigoryan traces it to the pilgrims who danced it at the monastery of Saint Karapet near Mush. The Seven Dances ask the pianist to suggest the daf and the duduk. The twelve Pieces for Children, most under a minute, were largely written in 1915, as the genocide of the Armenians was unfolding. The short Toghik closes the programme. Levon Eskenian of the Gurdjieff Ensemble has said that she “conveys the mysterious presence typical of rustic and ritual music.”

The press stressed how the piano is made to recall other instruments. In BBC Music Magazine, Michael Church noted that “with judicious use of staccato and pedalling” Grigoryan manages to suggest the duduk, the zurna, the tar and the daf. Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone praised her “ideal poise and incisiveness” and the spacious, focused sound. Writing for All About Jazz, Hrayr Attarian called it “a well-rounded representation of Komitas' work”. Komitas has a long history at ECM, from Kim Kashkashian's Hayren to Tigran Hamasyan's Luys i Luso.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2514, first released in September 2017.