Con anima gathers six chamber works by the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, born in Beirut in 1939. Violist Kim Kashkashian and violinist Movses Pogossian conceived the project for his 80th birthday and assembled a cast of players around it, many from the Armenian diaspora. The emphasis falls on late pieces: only the Third String Quartet dates from the 20th century. Throughout, Armenian sacred chant and folk melody meet Western modernist technique in music that is spare, slow to unfold and deeply rooted in its homeland.
The sessions took place between January and April 2019 at the Evelyn and Mo Ostin Music Center of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music in Los Angeles. Benjamin Maas was the recording engineer, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Alongside Kashkashian and Pogossian the core players include violinist Varty Manouelian and cellist Karen Ouzounian, joined by others for the sextet, the piano parts and the clarinet. The booklet carries an essay by Elena Dubinets, who writes that Mansurian's music "feels as if it was carved out of stone".
The title piece, a single-movement sextet for two violins, two violas and two cellos written in 2006-07, is a gloss on Shostakovich's Thirteenth Quartet, and its leading viola part falls to Kashkashian. Agnus Dei (2006), in memory of the violinist Oleg Kagan, uses the scoring of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and moves from meditation to near silence. Sonata da Chiesa (2015) for viola and piano honours the priest, composer and folklorist Komitas. The disc closes with Die Tänzerin (2014), a short duet for violin and viola built on an Armenian folk dance and written for Kashkashian and Manouelian.
In The Strad (2021), Carlos María Solare called Kashkashian in the sextet "a veritable prima inter pares who shapes her every phrase with overwhelming expressivity". David Olds of The Whole Note found "a brilliant, subdued and contemplative disc, perfect for our troubled times". Norman Lebrecht, in La Scena Musicale, heard in the 1993 quartet a palpable anxiety and credited ECM with bringing Mansurian's voice to a wide audience over many years.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2687, released on 6 November 2020, with notes by Elena Dubinets and Movses Pogossian.
