Gerstein’s ‘Music in Time of War’ Pairs Debussy and Komitas

KOMITAS, born Soghomon Soghomonyan, was brought up in a seminary near Yerevan after losing his mother and father at an early age. (The names “Komitas” and “Vardapet” were bestowed upon him later.) He emerged as a talented composer for voice, choir and piano despite protestations from the clergy. But, as he later spent time in Berlin and Paris, his most important contribution to Armenian music was as an avid collector of his country’s folk music.

He was more concerned with capturing and preserving an imagined spirit of folklore than in recording it with strict discipline, though he also pioneered modern-day approaches to ethnomusicology by working to understand the essential cultural context behind the music’s production. “In his research papers, he described not only the songs per se, but also the conditions of their performance — landscape, time of day, weather,” the musicologist Artur Avanesov writes in one of the album book’s essays. “Decades later, the same was done by Olivier Messiaen.”

Gerstein described Komitas’s music as “gestural” and “stark,” and as having “a feeling of immense space and spaciousness.” This is most keenly felt in his set of Armenian songs like “Tsirani Tsar,” in which single, unadorned lines are spread far apart at the piano, with a gaping chasm in between.

“I haven’t been able to perform these songs for a long time,” Mantashyan, the soprano, said in an interview. Her grandfather’s cousin, Alexander Mantashyan, was a patron of Komitas, and sent a grand piano to Berlin to help the composer work. She has known his songs since she was a student at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. But it has taken 15 years for her to feel like she’s ready to record them. As Avanesov says, “Writing on Komitas while living in Armenia is a task tantamount to rethinking the Scriptures.”

When Mantashyan collaborate with Gerstein on Komitas’s songs, “Antuni” (“Homeless”), a piece with deep resonance among the Armenian diaspora, was recorded in a single take then left unedited. “It’s not about perfection,” she said of the music. “It’s about pain.”