J.S. Bach

Movses Pogossian

Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin

A r m e n i A n - b o r n v i o l i n i s t Movses Pogossian made his American debut with the Bos-ton Pops in 1990, about which Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe wrote: “There is freedom in his playing, but also taste and discipline. It was a fiery, centered, and highly musical performance…” He is a Prize-winner of the 1986 Tchaikovsky

International Competition, and the youngest-ever First Prize winner of the 1985 USSR National Violin Competition, previ-ous winners of which included David Oistrakh and Gidon Kre-mer. He has extensively performed as soloist and recitalist in Europe, Northern America, and Asia, with orchestras such as Moscow Philharmonic, Armenian Philharmonic, Toronto Sinfo-nia, and Brandenburger Symphoniker, among others. Movses Pogossian is one of the 2016/17 Artists in Residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and performed the Mansurian Concerto No.2 at their season-opening concerts, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane.

Avid chamber musician, Pogossian has collaborated with such artists as Jeremy Denk, Kim Kashkashian, Alexei Lubi-mov, Rohan de Saram, and with members of the Tokyo, Kro-nos, and Brentano string quartets. He is Artistic Director of the acclaimed Dilijan Chamber Music Series, currently in its 12th season: dilijan.larkmusicalsociety.com

Committed champion of new music, Pogossian has pre-miered over 70 works, many of them written for him. He has worked closely with composers such as Kurtág, Harbison,

Saariaho, Mansurian, Chihara, Frank, Sharafyan, and Augusta Read Thomas, to name a few. At György Kurtág’s invitation, Movses Pogossian made his Darmstadt Festival debut in 2008 performing the Kafka Fragments with Tony Arnold, to critical acclaim. His duo with percussionist Kuniko Kato has com-missioned several works for this medium, and performs inter-nationally. In Los Angeles, Movses Pogossian frequently per-forms on Monday Evening Concerts, and is a recipient of the 2011 Forte Award, given by Jacaranda for his outstanding con-tributions to new music.

Pogossian’s discography includes solo violin CDs “Bloom-ing Sounds” and “In Nomine”, and Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments”, with soprano Tony Arnold. In his review, Paul Griffiths writes: “…remarkable is Pogossian’s contribution, which is always beau-tiful, across a great range of colors and gestures, and always seems on the edge of speaking—or beyond.” His latest Bridge Records CD of Violin Works of Stefan Wolpe made the 2015 Top Ten list in the Sunday Times (UK). Upcoming releases include a Schoenberg/Webern DVD, recorded at Arnold Schoenberg’s Brentwood home (with Kim Kashkashian, Rohan de Saram, and Judith Gordon), an “Inspired by Bach” project of works for solo violin by Kaija Saariaho, and premieres by Gabriela Frank and Andrew McIntosh, commissioned for the artist by New Mu-sic USA.

Movses Pogossian is Professor of Violin at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He participates in the Music for Food project, which raises awareness of the hunger problem faced by a large percent of the population, and gives the opportunity to experience the powerful role music can play as a catalyst for change.

Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 10011 I. Adagio 5:562 II. Fugue 5:263 III. Siciliana 4:394 IV. Presto 4:08

Violin Partita No. 1 in B Minor, BWV 10025 I. Allemanda 7:486 II. Double 3:597 III. Corrente 3:358 IV. Double 3:459 V. Sarabande 5:2010 VI. Double 3:4211 VII. Tempo di Borea 3:4812 VIII. Double 3:54

Total Time: 56:07

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Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 10031 I. Grave 5:542 II. Fugue 9:033 III. Andante 7:274 IV. Allegro 6:04

Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 10045 I. Allemanda 7:216 II. Corrente 3:087 III. Sarabanda 5:508 IV. Gigue 4:369 V. Ciaccona 17:16

Total Time: 1:06:45

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3Violin Sonata No. 3 in C Major, BWV 10051 I. Adagio 5:552 II. Fugue 12:323 III. Largo 4:334 IV.Allegro assai 5:33

Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 10065 I. Prelude 3:496 II. Loure 5:087 III. Gavotte en Rondeau 3:108 IV.Menuet I and II 5:039 V. Bourrée 1:3710 VI.Gigue 2:08

Total Time: 49:36

on Bach’s six solo pieces for violinPaUL gRiFFiTHs

Sonata

adagio / Grave

How to begin. With an assertion, a chord. With a question, a chord? An assertion becomes a question. An assertion opens a space that has to be filled, a time-frame that has to be continued, and eventually completed. You say something, then wonder what you have implied — what assumptions now have to be enlarged upon, in a world where everything is on view. You begin to sketch in the background, which thus arrives as aftermath.

The composer is thirty-five. No longer a young man by the standards of the time, he has four children, aged between five and twelve.

How to begin again. How to repeat. The musician is fifty. He has played these pieces many times. Now he does so again. But there is no repetition. This time is different from the last. The next will be different again.

Notes appear as challenges, surprises, dread inevitabilities, points of interrogation. That last diminuendo moves on and looks back — with regret?

Fuga

Many while one. Hence the need for the many voices the one musician plays to be pulled tight together sometimes in chords under the theme, whose feet — notes — get stuck in the nets of the other parts, which are its past and its future. The present is entrammelled. Then it soars.

One while many. Here is a musician playing music, playing an instrument, playing in western classical style and intonation, playing the violin, playing alone, playing Bach. Here is this particular musician playing music, etc. Here

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is the composer rehearsing, writing, performing, imagining, teaching his eldest son. Here is the instrument, in all the twisted fibres of its abrasive insistence, its delicacy, its agility, its speech-like range of articulation.

Many but one. The pathway of notes, given, is just one looping line along a multi-dimensional journey, through trajectories also of colour, volume and attack, through constant changings of character that make the whole.

One but many. Fugue as attempt to say more than you can. Fugue as obsession. Fugue as dance.

Through prism upon prism, voice upon voice, person upon person, the line extends towards its destined close. Yet even here choices are open. Arrival, in the minor key, can be fright.

Siciliana / andante / Largo

Slowly the music moves through elongated measures, having the pulse of a body at rest. This is the music of waiting.Slowly it revolves around itself, one line held and turned by another below. There will be moments of brightness when the one sounds like a pure harmonic of the other, when blending they glow.Slowly it rotates around another axis, keeps making the same step — a nudge and a falter, a thread of old sad song over a throbbing accompaniment — again and again. If it departs, its departure is a search for the way back, which it achieves with satisfaction, perhaps, or perhaps exasperation at the inability to continue, to go further, to break away.

Presto / allegro / allegro assai

There is one way out: dance. Intimated before, this now comes fully in the proper form, the form that is everywhere in a partita: one wing, and then the same wing again; the other wing, and then this other wing again.Each flight comes to its own destination, the one it is creating for itself. (But then, the finale may not be it. It may have come already, and the last movement be a swing away, or the finishing of a swing. Or it may not yet have been attained, only glimpsed.)

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The composer is employed by Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, a music-loving, violin-playing prince almost ten years his junior.Each sonata comes to its own dance, in its own rhythm and tempo. Presto was the composer’s fastest marking, implying for this gigue a speed at the limits of the possible. Allegro is for the bourrée, an echo-song, Allegro assai the corrente, a running dance.Sound brings alive a gilded space — not only the room resonating with the music but also the body of the instrument, kept in vibration by the rapidly repeated touchings at the same points, and, beyond the instrument, something wholly abstract: the space of sound itself, the space filled with proportions and ladders of overtones, shining. (And not only here.)The shimmer comes too, of course, from the speed. In an age before machines, music is the fastest way of counting.

a

PartitaPreludio

Where all is dance, fanfaring bends into a corrente, in the radiant, radiating space of the last sonata movement. From the close comes the opening.

LoureThe slow triple rhythm — three beats, each susceptible to the subdivisions, upbeats, ornaments and delays of a flounced formality — recalls the siciliana.Everything is recalling something else. The pieces, though so keenly delineated, show each other’s reflections.

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Gleaming on them too is the image of French music (though there the loure seems to have gone at a faster pace).Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, like any prince of the age, sets the mirrors of his court towards Versailles.

allemandaOne and two and three and four and: the trail of quavers leads up and down, round and round, but also on and on, into passages of threat and surprise. (And not only here.) If the brave front of dotted rhythm offers some protection, it lasts only a while.

Double: Then it all happens again, in smoother time.

Gavotte en rondeauIt starts with a nursery rhyme, a game. Alternate verses prove the innocence deceptive, force the game to take note. It changes its ground, now circumspect, now assertive, perhaps desperate, now aware.

CorrenteIn one case, dotted rhythms, the jog of horse riding.The prince and his retinue, including the composer, are on their way back from the spa resort of Carlsbad. It is summer.In the other case, even rhythms, the running of fingertips.Double: Then it all happens again, in smoother time, on skates.

MenuetAll these courtly dances began in peasant merry-making, or so they say, and the composer and the musician want to

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agree.But not entirely. The opening, which could almost be played on wind instruments, across the fields, turns dark and awkward. In the second part bagpipes take over, and stall.

Sarabande / SarabandaThree slow beats, with weight on the second, a dance without joy. Notes come if they dare.In one case, an elegy, a song moving through complaint and grief.As a Calvinist the prince does not need from his composer church music or, still less, theatrical entertainment. The voices of instruments make up for these denials.In the other case, dance as chorale.Double: Then it all happens again, in smoother time, as chorale made flowing melody.

tempo di Borea / Bourrée

Again a ‘peasant’ dance, Italian or French.Also on horseback or in carriages are other members of the prince’s musical household. They might include the virtuoso for whom the composer wrote these works, if that person was not himself.The French spins; the Italian is a clodhopping stomp. At the close it returns to its opening, which is no longer the same. (And not only here.)Double: Then it all happens again, in smoother time, slipping away.

Giga / GigueThe Italian races to escape the circles it draws.

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The French sweeps up and down, then hesitates. No body is leaping here, but thought, in a dance of the mind. (And not only here.)

CiacconaThe composer will know by now that his wife, when he returns, will need neither his kisses nor his stories. She will need only a memorial.The rhythm is that of the sarabande: slow, heavy, triple. But this is a dance on a repeating four-bar pattern of scalewise descent from D to A: the inexorably circling, purposefully driving bass of the ciaccona, or chaconne. Sixty-four times it comes, repeating the initial theme twice: halfway through and just before the finish.Even further than in the sonatas’ fugues, the composer drives the violin to become a polyphonic instrument, implying up to seven simultaneous lines. And the musician multiplies the entanglement of voices: tentative, decisive, anxious, excited, proud.Like a voice, too, in its enunciation, the violin breathes, pants.‘If I were to imagine that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’ ( Johannes Brahms)Finally the voices spiral into the keynote. This was the lesson that had to be taught and learned. How to end.

Paul Griffiths 2005/2016 (revised in 2016)

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With Kurtágs, Budapest, Sept. 2015

Score with autograph of György Kurtág

Recorded on - December 21-23, 2015, and May 28-30, 2016, at the Recording Studio of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Executive Producer: Varty ManouelianRecording Session Producers: Benjamin Maas and Varty ManouelianEdit Producers: Varty Manouelian and Movses PogossianRecording, Editing & Mastering: Benjamin Maas, Fifth Circle AudioAdditional Editing: Jonathan BrunsLiner Notes: Paul GriffithsPhotos: Anneliese Varaldiev, Judit Kurtág, Benjamin MaasLogistical support: Luis HenaoArtistic and technical advice: Guillaume SutreProject management: Daniel LippelDesign: Marc Wolf (marcjwolf.com)

The recording is made possible, in part, by the UCLA Faculty Research Grant, and the Faculty Opportunity Fund of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Dedications

To my parents Edward and Nina - for sacrificing everything for meTo my wife Varty - for keeping me humbleTo my brother Levon, who loves BachTo my children Eddie, Cara, and Anoush - for their unconditional loveTo György and Márta Kurtág - for the priceless gift of their inspirational friendshipTo my teachers Levon Zorian, Villi Mokatsian, and Louis Krasner - for their kindnessTo my students - for teaching meTo Vatsche Barsoumian - for his big heartTo my musical heroes: Pablo Casals, Yehudi Menuhin, Maria Callas, Kim Kashkashian, Mark Steinberg

All the proceeds from this recording will be donated by the artist, in equal measure, to:

Lark Musical Society, Glendale, CA: www.larkmusicalsociety.comMusic for Food, Boston, MA: www.musicforfoodboston.org

newfocusrecordings.com℗&© 2017 MoVSeS PoGoSSIAn

Disc 1VioliN SoNAtA No. 1 iN G MiNor, BWV 1001

VioliN PArtitA No. 1 iN B MiNor, BWV 1002

Disc 2VioliN SoNAtA No. 2 iN A MiNor, BWV 1003

VioliN PArtitA No. 2 iN D MiNor, BWV 1004

Disc 3VioliN SoNAtA No. 3 iN C MAjor, BWV 1005VioliN PArtitA No. 3 iN E MAjor, BWV 1006

FCR178 • DDD℗&© 2017 MoVSeS PoGoSSIAn

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