CD ECM Records Tigran Hamasyan: Luis I Luso

2015

Tigran Hamasyan Piano, Prepared Piano
Yerevan State Choir
Harutyun Topikyan Conductor

Pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s ECM debut is an extraordinary exploration of Armenian sacred music. Hamasyan has selected hymns and sharakans (Armenia’s liturgical songs) as well as chants by Grigor Narekatsi, Nerses Shnorhali, Mesrop Mashtots, Mkhitar Ayrivanetsi, Grigor Pahlavuni, Komitas, and Makar Yekmalyan and arranged this selection for voices and piano. This is music of the 5th to 20th centuries, finding new and dramatic expression through Hamasyan’s improvisational imagination and the committed performances of Armenia’s leading choir. Luys i Luso (Light from the Light) was recorded in Yerevan in October 2014, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
In March 2015, Tigran Hamasyan and the Yerevan State Chamber Choir began an extensive tour of churches in Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Lebanon, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Czech Republic, England, Germany, Luxembourg, Russia and USA, celebrating Armenia’s rich musical heritage around the world.

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‘Luys i Luso’ is a meditation around the sacred music of his home country on the centenary of the Armenian genocide. The material ranges from fifth century sharakans to newer hymns arranged for piano and voices. At its heart is the beautifully rough-grained sound of Armenia’s leading choir conducted by Harutyun Topikyan, with its gentle, unwavering sopranos and spine-tingling low bass drones unfolding in intense slow builds and thick chordal textures.
Kate Molleson, The Guardian

Arranged by Hamasyan, the pieces date from the 5th to the 20th centuries and are sung by a 23-strong choir in an earthily passionate liturgical style. The role of the piano is vital: sometimes introducing a theme, sometimes improvising around it, Hamasyan uses the characteristic, Eastern-hued Armenian modes to summon up an ancient world. It’s very different to Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble’s million-selling ‘Officium’, but if you liked that, you’ll love this.
Phil Johnson, Independent On Sunday

Guaranteed you won’t hear anything remotely like this in 2015. Whether it will become a new Officium and ignite the imagination of the broader jazz and particularly classical music public’s curiosity on a mass scale is impossible to predict. But the striking unearthly qualities and interventions of ancient cultures and history made into the way we think about music and live today are somehow at work in the same way as the Hilliards and Jan Garbarek achieved in combination back in the 1990s despite the huge musical and cultural differences. […] ‘Luys i Luso’ is an extraordinarily spiritual album that has a humbling majesty and stillness to it. The title meaning, in English, ‘light from light’, explores Armenian sacred music, the pianist loosely improvising around Armenian modes at one with the chamber choir interpreting newly arranged Armenian hymns, sharakans (chants) and cantos some dating back to the 5th century by among others Grigor Narekatsi, Nerses Shnorhali, Mesrop Mashtots, Mkhitar Ayrivanetsi, Grigor Pahlavuni and Komitas mainly written in grabar, the oldest form of the Armenian language. […] The heady themes of repentance, devotion and struggle unite in an unerring mood that holds your attention from start to finish remarkably powerful even in the secular world we live in.
Stephen Graham, Marlbank

An impeccably crafted collection of Armenian sacred music scored for piano and chamber choir that seduces the ear with its breathtakingly beautiful soundscapes in which Hamasyan’s delicate piano filigrees are augmented by plaintive, massed vocal arrangements.
Charles Waring, Record Collector

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