We can celebrate two Torontonians on a new made-in-Winnipeg album: Isabel Bayrakdarian and Serouj Kradjian. The soprano lends her vocal art to her husband’s compositional imagination in a seductive programme titled Troubadour & the Nightingale.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
The album, released today on the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra’s in-house MCO Records label, is a potent collaboration by everyone concerned. The music is largely rooted in Medieval culture- and religion-crossing intersections along the Mediterranean Sea’s European coastlines, as propagated by minstrels.
The melodies are largely modal and melismatic, giving them that sound 19th century northern Europeans called exotic. All of the music has been arranged or composed by Kradjian.
Kradjian, who began his professional career as a pianist, uses the orchestra with remarkable restraint, choosing only those instruments that will help underline the message behind each song. Manitoba Chamber Orchestra music director Anne Manson lays everything out with absolute clarity.
The album contains a lot of music by Maurice Ravel — Five Greek Songs as well as Kaddisch and Tripatos. There is also a set of four songs by Sayat-Nova, an 18th century Armenian court musician who suddenly found himself a minstrel after he fell in love with the king’s daughter.
But the album’s centrepiece is Kradjian’s setting of a five-poem cycle by trobairitz, the women troubadours who flourished while their men were off fighting the Crusades. Kradjian has titled the set Trobairitz Ysabella.
Because history was until very recently written by men, we don’t actually know who Ysabella was, but we can celebrate all the Unknown Women of her time through Kradjian’s thoughtful and nicely layered selection of love poems and devotional verses.
One of his most affecting settings is of a Spanish-Jewish woman’s prayer, the first of two songs titled “From Jerusalem to Andalusia.”
Kradjian opens the cycle with an purely instrumental “Invitation to the Voyage,” a beautiful clarinet showpiece.
Bayrakdarian is passionately engaged with this music from beginning to end, deploying a great range of expressive and dynamic subtlety.
There is a lot to love here, including the spacious audio captured inside Winnipeg’s St John’s Cathedral.
You can find out more about Troubadour & the Nightingale here.
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The public launch of the album takes place today. Baryrakdarian and Kradjian will be present at Toronto’s last remaining independent classical record store, Atelier Grigorian, 70 Yorkville Ave., from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
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It’s a big week for Serouj Kradjian, who is the central figure in a flamenco-themed concert presented by Soundstreams at Trinity-St Paul’s on Wednesday night. You can read more about it here.
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There’s no opera on Isabel Bayrakdarian’s concert-focused schedule this season. In April, she sings with Tafelmusik in a concert celebrating two great Italian opera divas of Handel’s London. Details here.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
