In an article on Hindemith,
published in 1941 in the New York
Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson offered
the judgement that Hindemith's music "is both mountainous and
mouselike. The volume of it is enormous; its expressive content is
minute and not easy to catch. It is obviously both competent and
serious. It is dogmatic and forceful
and honest and completely without charm.
It is as German as anything could be
and farther removed from the Viennese
spirit than any music could be that
wasn't the work of a German from the
Lutheran North. It has no warmth, no
psychological understanding, no gentleness,
no gemütlichkeit, and no
sex appeal. It hasn't even the smooth
surface tension of systematic atonality.
It is neither humane nor stylish, though
it does have a kind of style, a style
rather like that of some ponderously
monumental and not wholly incommodious
railway station". I wonder if Thomson
ever heard the Sonata for Solo Violin,
recorded here by Movses Pogossian?
I can't speak for its
sex appeal, but the sonata certainly
has plenty going for it in terms of
lyrical expressiveness and, indeed,
psychological understanding; it strikes
me as a profoundly "humane" piece. It
has, by turns gracility (especially
in the first movement) and angularity
(in the second movement); there is as
much humour as "monumentality" in its
third movement, played entirely pizzicato;
its final movement is a set of variations
on Mozart's song Komm, Lieber Mai
(K596), of which Pogossian writes in his booklet notes, as if
answering Thomson, "each of the five charming variations has its
distinct character", observing, correctly, that "the last
variation winds its way up through some delicious harmonic
modulations, and leads to a surprising and elegant conclusion". No
railway stations here, incommodious or otherwise - though, ironically enough,
the work is said to have been written
in a single day during a train journey!
Pogossian is a persuasive
advocate for the virtues of Hindemith's
sonata; its considerable technical demands
evidently present him with no problems
and, quite without any sense of forcing
the issue, he brings out both its lyrical
qualities and its sophisticated structure.
Hindemith's sonata
belongs to a period some fifty years
or more earlier than that to which its
companions on this CD belong. Himself
Armenian in origin, Pogossian begins
his programme with works by two fellow
Armenians. Vache Sharafyan's name will
perhaps be familiar from his contributions
to Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. Blooming
Sounds is an eclectic synthesis
of idioms old and new, eastern and western,
moving through a sequence of moods and
tempos and rich in instrumental effects;
in Pogossian's hands there is a convincing unity to the results.
Adam Khoudoyan's
Sonata is a single movement work, but falls into six
distinct sections. For the most part it is in a rather more
traditional - at times almost romantic - idiom than Sharafyan's Blooming
Sounds and its use of dynamic contrast
is highly effective. Pogossian plays
it with conviction and technical certainty.
The American Augusta
Read Thomas is perhaps less well-known
in Britain than she should be, although
her work has been conducted by such
luminaries as Barenboim, Boulez and
Eschenbach, with orchestras such as
the Chicago Symphony and the LSO. Pulsar
was commissioned by the BBC and the
Royal Philharmonic Society and premiered
in London by Ilya Gringolts; Movses
Pogossian gave the American premiere
in Buffalo, New York. It is a densely
written piece characterised by long,
spinning lines and eloquent silences;
Incantation is a work of unironic
beauty and tender grace, attractively
shaped and played ravishingly, and quite
without sentimentality, by Pogossian.
Leif Segerstam is probably
still better known as a conductor than
a composer. The notes he provides for
the booklet are characteristically entertaining,
though it can't really be said that
they throw an awful lot of light on
the music. One sentence of over a hundred
and fifty words deserves reproduction
at length, but I'll settle instead for
quoting a few (?) words about "the
challenging experience-phenomenology
of decision-making mechanisms motivating
the movements in the world of possibilities
of musical material accessible at that
stage of my development as a natural
open-minded multi-musical talent holding
the beloved extension of tentacles (=
the violin) planted as close as possible
to the source for the thought which
emerged when you checked the points
of movements with simple yes or no question
before taking the decision finalizing
the notation of these points in the
broad NNNNOOOOOOWWW!". Indeed.
Although Why Yes or Now has something
of the same quality, a kind of musical
stream of consciousness, it is actually
rather easier to follow than Segerstam's
prose. Fertility of ideas has never
been a problem for Segerstam - who has composed some 128
symphonies! - and
there are plenty in evidence here.
In Another Face,
David Felder responds to one of the
works of the Japanese novelist, Kobo
Abe, published in English as The
Face of Another. How the composition works is well described
by the composer; it "proposes small musical modules juxtaposed in
coded sequences as the small building blocks contained with
extended lines. Each of the small modules consists of a pair - two pitches and
two distinct rhythmic values, which
are repeated locally (for memory's sake), and transformed
formally through four passes through the sequence". Alongside
these systematically handled materials - and in a sense emerging
from them - is a more lyrical impulse which effects both a
metamorphosis and a kind of reconciliation. Technically very
demanding for the player and hard - but rewarding - listening,
Another Face is a striking piece
given a fine performance by Pogossian.
An excellent CD of
(mostly) contemporary pieces for solo
violin, grounded, as it were, in a performance
of one of Hindemith's sonatas for solo
violin, all played with utter technical
assurance and plenty of feeling.
Glyn Pursglove
Movses Pogossian (violin) 
