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Djivan Gasparyan, Hossein Alizadeh Perform In London

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  • Djivan Gasparyan, Hossein Alizadeh Perform In London

    DJIVAN GASPARYAN, HOSSEIN ALIZADEH PERFORM IN LONDON

    armradio.am
    16:43 01.10.2012

    The duduk, the double-reeded Armenian oboe, has become synonymous with
    Djivan Gasparyan, who has played it for Stalin and Kennedy; with Sting
    and Lionel Richie; and now, in his mid-eighties, at the Barbican. Ten
    years ago, Gasparyan made a celebrated appearance in Tehran with the
    Persian classical musician Hossein Alizādeh, and it was a coup for
    the Barbican Centre, the largest performing arts centre in Europe,
    to secure a repeat performance, the Financial Times writes.

    "Alizādeh won a standing ovation from the Iranian half of the audience
    simply for walking on. Cross-legged on a carpet with his setar, he
    played phrases and their own echoes, ornamenting his ornamentations
    until the instrument sang stories within stories, all while Pejman
    Hadidi tapped his fingertips on his tombak and flicked his nails as
    if striking a match," the paper reads.

    "It was the kind of slow trance that could have lasted for 20 minutes
    or three hours; it was nearly an hour before he yielded to Gasparyan,
    who entered to his own ovation from his own countrymen. He led a
    quartet of duduks, including one bass version that he had invented
    himself; and also including his grandson, also named Djivan. At first,
    Gasparyan senior played melancholy melodies over a slow drone from
    the others: when the bass shifted down a third, the difference felt
    seismic. The ratio of air to jig was about five to one, but at the end
    of a tune the quartet would sometimes break into a polyphonic dance.

    Gasparyan junior took some lead parts, with impossibly fast trills
    that sounded like a button accordion. At times, the quartet's music
    sighed like 1930s crooners; then the melodies sheered into dissonances
    that sounded continents away from European music," the article reads.

    "Following Alizādeh's lead, the quartet played a couple of songs
    too many, so it was two hours into the concert before Armenians and
    Iranians shared a stage. Alizādeh bulked out his band with a fiddle
    player and two women, one with a qanun, the other singing. The three
    younger duduk players joined him, first interposing solos and then
    (when audible) weaving around the voice's call-and-response with
    Alizādeh's shurangiz and the qanun. "Torkaman" had yelping vocals and
    a deep drumbeat, while the duduks breathed clouds of unease. Gasparyan
    senior returned, not to play but to sing with the timbre of the duduk.

    A five-beat Armenian folk song gathered both halves of the audience
    in applause from the first note," the article concludes.

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