Oratorio by Khaçadur Avedisyan (review)

Released by KALAN Music in 2009, this CD set is the first presentation of Avetisyan’s Oratoriofor listeners in Turkey. ¹Two earlier releases were in 1999 by Editions NECH (Paris) and in 2004 by Narek Music Publishing (Yerevan). The seven-movement, symphonic work was composed in 1985 by Khachatur Avetisyan for the 70th Anniversary Commemoration of the Medz Yeghern(Great catastrophe). Medz Yeghernrefers to the forced deportation of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire by the Ottoman government in 1915. These events are considered part of the deportation policy by Turks, yet are memorialized by Armenians as genocide because many Armenians lost their lives.

Composers can sometimes be perceptive to events that compose a part of and have significance for the collective memory of their time. The 1812 Overturecomposed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to commemorate the defense of motherland Russia against Napoleon’s invading troops in 1812 and performed in Moscow in 1882 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the event is one such example of this musical phenomenon. In the same vein, Krysztof Penderecki dedicated his Polish Requiem, composed from 1980 to 1984 and expanded in 1993 and again in 2005, to the heroes and victims of Polish history (Bolesławska-Lewandowska 2011, 181). These two examples reveal composers with perceptiveness similar to that shown by Avetisyan in composing his work Oratorio. In order to fully comprehend the Armenian phenomenon, it is critical to understand the significance of the events of 1915 in the collective memory of Armenians.

The events of 1915 were not commemorated officially in Armenia until 1965. The Republic of Turkey and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were treated as allies in Lenin’s policies because of their oppositional stance toward Western imperialism. During Stalin’s rule, there were attempts to change the borders between Turkey and Armenia, but the onset of the Cold War once World War II ended and Turkey’s siding with the United States rendered all attempts to change the border impossible. During the rule of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Armenian communist leaders seized autonomy from the central Soviet leaders. On April 24, 1965, the 50th anniversary of the Medz Yeghernwas commemorated officially at the Yerevan Opera House.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms lent more liberty to Armenians and other nationalities of the USSR to enjoy their national identities and culture. At the time Avetisyan composed his Oratorioin the mid-1980s, the Soviet policy toward different ethnicities reflected relative moderation (Suny 2005).

Avetisyan’s Oratoriomakes direct reference to nineteenth-century Armenian musical traditions. He employs musical ideas and instruments associated with the ashughner, Armenian traveling musicians. These minstrels used wind instruments such as the zurna, duduk, shvi, blul, and shepherd’s pipe, as well as string instruments like the tar, kemenche, kanun, and santur(Muratyan 1970, 17). Armenians gradually became familiar with European musical traditions as well—a trend that gained momentum after they became part of the Russian Empire (ibid., 518). Following the establishment of the republic as part of the USSR in 1920, the Armenians founded their folk music ensembles in increasingly similar organizational form to that of European academic music orchestras (Prudyan 2001, 42, 91). They also removed microtonal or modal intervals from their music systems while gradually incorporating Western harmony and polyphonic practices into Armenian folk traditions (ibid., 47). Although microtonal intervals were eliminated, folk music melodies in stylized forms suggesting those modalities are still found in the works of many Armenian composers, as is the case in Oratorio.

As noticeable in the recording reviewed here, Avetisyan’s use of folk music instruments, the shviand the kanun, should be regarded as a conscious...