Mayr / Bossa / Belfiori Doro / Codeluppi - Vespri Per Il Corpus Domini 1802 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Violinist Movses Pogossian has assembled this illuminating collection of contemporary music from Armenia, InchModulation Necklace,Inch revealing a vibrant repertoire whose aesthetics are as outward looking as they are grounded in their reverence of a centuries old culture. In his liner notes, Pogossian acknowledges the long shadow that the Soviet Union cast on Armenian composers during it's reign - this recording celebrates this generation's liberation from those constraints. The composer Tigran Mansurian played a pivotal role in connecting the threads of this Armenian new music tradition, both by literally introducing Pogossian to musicians involved in the project, but also in his courage and leadership to explore Western and later older Armenian sources for inspiration during the Soviet era. The performers heard here are drawn from Pogossian's Dilijan Chamber Music Series, the Lark Musical Society, as well as the flagship group of UCLA's Armenian Music Program, the VEM Ensemble.

Terra Infirma was directly inspired by the experiences of it's creative team. Reena Esmail, who resides in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena, was forced to evacuate her home during the catastrophic fires of January 2025. Kondonassis, a committed advocate for the environment, is founder and director of the non-profit organization Earth at Heart; her initiatives include the widely-praised commissioning project FIVE MINUTES for Earth.Terra Infirma reflects not only the environmental passion and advocacy of both artists, but also their inspiration to innovate and expand the concerto form. In this bold new work, with a title taken from a poem by Robert Walters, the harp symbolizes the protagonist Earth, both fragile and powerful. The towering instrument is moved choreographically by Kondonassis across the stage as she journeys through various arrays of suspended percussion. In the composer's words, the work is Inchpart virtuoso concerto, part performance art, and part theater.InchEsmail, who is Indian-American, has drawn on her extensive studies of Hindustani music in composing Terra Infirma. Her compositional voice is at once arresting, lyrical, haunting, and fierce. The work, which includes a defining movement titled InchImmolation,Inch incorporates elements of Raag Deepak, an ancient collection of pitches believed to invoke fire. Kondonassis, known for Incha range of colour that's breathtaking,Inch (Gramophone), brings the work to life with colorful authenticity.Says Esmail, InchTerra Infirma sits somewhere between a harp/percussion concerto and a monodrama - Yolanda leads us through the trajectory of a wildfire, starting with the eerie moments before the first spark, and ending with the hope of new growth. The work explores our human relationship to fire - a force that can be at once devastating and illuminating.It has been a dream to work so closely with Yoland

Emiliano Turazzi leads us in these three works into an InchexistentialInch condition in which music takes place in more or less ample time strings for which the exercise of memory, the InchposthumousInch listening, would be partly difficult, but partly also superfluous. Turazzi's music exists in the moment in which it exists. In these three pieces one has the clear sensation that air is converted into time, time into objects, into agglomerates always subtly varied, defined in the smallest folds that cannot really be experienced- except at the moment of their manifestation and their Inchhitting usInch. The sensation of living in these strings of sound-existence also persists in the recording, in the mechanical reproduction that makes us lose the spatial dimension and the unrepeatable experience of the moment, but that also induces us to live every single sound, every subtlety, and every quality of matter without too much having a final, global InchmeaningInch in mind.