David Denton
David's Review Corner, June 2015

​

The Western world knows little about Armenian music, though it has a rich history stretching back to the Middle Ages, this disc offering 20th century works for piano. Beginning with the Six Dances by Komitas, one of the early collectors of folk-song which he notated for piano, each quite short and based on music he had collected. Often unusual in their harmonic twists and turns, their rustic quality is highly attractive, though thirteen years earlier, in the four Crimean Sketches from Aleksandr Spendiarian, we are in a far more cultured quality, though they too are based on folk melodies, the writing having a warmth missing in Komitas’s more spartan regime. Particularly winning is the mercurial and joyful sketch, Chanson a boire, the whole work requiring that we hear more from this neglected composer. Arno Babadjanian, a pupil of Khachaturian, is our most recognised name on the disc, the six short pieces, written over the period 1936 to 1947, are in a very commercial style that borders on salon music with a jazzy Humoresque and an Elegy to his mentor that includes fleeting references to Khachaturian’s ballet music. Taken directly from discs issued on the Grand Piano label, and previously reviewed in these columns, come seven highly attractive Preludes from Edouard Abramian and Eduard Bagdasarian written in the period style of Rachmaninov. Finally to the present century with three pieces from Robert Amirkhanian, still firmly rooted in the Romantic era, their melodies pleasing and the harmonies delightful though predictable, while the delicacy of Children’s Images has passing influences of French Impressionism. Impeccable and lucid playing from the Armenian pianist, Mikael Ayrapetyan, completes an inexpensive sampler of his native piano composers.

© 2015 David’s Review Corner