Shostakovich
& other
Soviet Composers






























    		
      














 Levon Ambartsumian  CDs


Levon Ambartsumian was born in Moscow in 1955, and began to study violin at the age of three. He graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with a special Artist Diploma. His teachers were 
Felix Andrievski, Yuri Yankelevitch, Leonid Kogan and Igor Bezrodny. 

In 1988 he founded the Moscow Chamber Orchestra "ARCO" which regularly performed in Russia and now resides in Athens, Georgia, USA. 
His repertoire includes the major violin pieces. He devotes himself to contemporary Russian music and has made several important world premiers.

The CD "The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich" (Phoenix PHCD 151) contains Shostakovich's Concerto for piano, orchestra and trumpet opus 35, his Chamber Symphony opus 110A and 
his Prelude and Scherzo for stringorchestra opus 11. The ARCO Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Levon Ambertsumian with Damon Denton (piano) and Fred Mills (trumpet), is full of prankish humor, possibly as a challenge to the traditional Russian concerto. Rudolf Barshai transcribed 
Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 for chamber orchestra. Shostakovich composed this quartet after a visit to Dresden, Germany. He was overwhelmed with emotion after learning of the complete devastation of the city, a result of Allied bombing raids in February 1945, in which 140,000 people died.


Levon Ambartsumian performs with Anatoly Sheludyakov (piano) Shostakovich's Violin 

Sonata opus 134 and his Viola Sonata opus 147 (Phoenix PHCD 155).
The Violin Sonata opus 134 was written in honor of David Oistrakh's 60th birthday and 
premiered in Moscow on May 2, 1969, with David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter performing.

The Viola Sonata opus 147 was Shostakovich's last work. It was dedicated to the violist Fyodor Druzhinin, 
a professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and a member of the Beethoven String Quartet, a renowned Moscow ensemble that played at the premieres of many of Shostakovich's String Quartets. Fyodor Druzhinin and Mikhail Muntyan premiered the Viola Sonata in Leningrad on October 1, 1975.


Arutiunian's Violin Concerto "Armenia-88" is a perfect example of a balanced melding of a rhetorical Baroqye style, 

Classical form and Romantic harmonies, all with modem sensibilities. Dedicated to the 
violinist Ruben Agaronyan, 
who premiered the work in Yerevan in 1989, the concerto was written in response to the 
devastating earthquake that had struck Spitak, Armenia. 
Although not program music in the strict sense, Vasks' Violin Concerto conveys at once a 
sense of noble grief, tragic pathos, optimism and irony.

Vasks resolutly addresses, preaches, advocates; therefore 
his music is not classical but programmed in a literary sense: in conjunction with an idea, 
a moral and emotional frame of reference.

Bronner dedicated his Violin Concerto "Heaven's Gates", composed in 2001, to Levon Ambartsumian. Ambartsumian is the violinist and conductor of the ARCO Chamber Orchestra in these three concertos, released by Phoenix (PHCD 153).


Phoenix PHCD 159 contains three other interesting works: Bronner's Lonely Voice, 

Alexander Tchaikovsky's Distant Dreams of Childhood and Peteris Vasks' Musica Dolorosa. 

The main inspiration for Alexander Tchaikovsky's Distant Dreams of Childhood is 
the irrevocable passing of childhood, the putative happiest time in the life of a human being. 
During writing of this concerto the composer was influenced by Nikita Mikhailov's 
film "Several Days from the Life of Oblomov", which is based on the novel by Ivan Turgenev.

Vasks completed Musica Dolorosa in 1983, shortly before the death of his sister, to whose memory this work is dedicated. He called this composition "my most tragic opus where there is no optimism, no hope - only pain".


Schnittke's Sonata for violin and piano No. 2 (1968) was his first experiment into polystylism 
and contains sharp musical contrasts and collisions of distant, even polar, styles and ideas.

Schnittke's Violin Concerto No. 3 (1978) is a bit more restrained. While energic at times, the overall sense and direction of the piece is towards the quiet and deeply moving ending. 
The chant-influenced orchestra writing treats the ensemble like a large organ in which each instrument functions like a 'stop', reserving 
the section string sound for the very end.

As one would expect from its title, central to Schnittke's A Paganini for violin (1982) are excerpts from Nicolo Paganini's violin usic, namely the Caprices. The themes are presented as part of a cadenza (direct precursor to the caprice), 
once again interrupted by harsh chords. Non-Romantic in conception, this very difficult piece could be interpreted as a nightmarish portrayal of Paganini's so-called 'devil-inspired' violin playing (Phoenix PHCD 150).







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