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KOMITAS,<\/strong> born Soghomon Soghomonyan, was brought up in a seminary near Yerevan after losing his mother and father at an early age. (The names \u201cKomitas\u201d and \u201cVardapet\u201d were bestowed upon him later.) He emerged as a talented composer for voice, choir and piano despite protestations from the clergy. But, as he later spent time in Berlin and Paris, his most important contribution to Armenian music was as an avid collector of his country\u2019s folk music.<\/p>\n He was more concerned with capturing and preserving an imagined spirit of folklore than in recording it with strict discipline, though he also pioneered modern-day approaches to ethnomusicology by working to understand the essential cultural context behind the music\u2019s production. \u201cIn his research papers, he described not only the songs per se, but also the conditions of their performance \u2014 landscape, time of day, weather,\u201d the musicologist Artur Avanesov writes in one of the album book\u2019s essays. \u201cDecades later, the same was done by Olivier Messiaen.\u201d<\/p>\n Gerstein described Komitas\u2019s music as \u201cgestural\u201d and \u201cstark,\u201d and as having \u201ca feeling of immense space and spaciousness.\u201d This is most keenly felt in his set of Armenian songs like \u201cTsirani Tsar,\u201d in which single, unadorned lines are spread far apart at the piano, with a gaping chasm in between.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t been able to perform these songs for a long time,\u201d Mantashyan, the soprano, said in an interview. Her grandfather\u2019s cousin, Alexander Mantashyan, was a patron of Komitas, and sent a grand piano to Berlin to help the composer work. She has known his songs since she was a student at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. But it has taken 15 years for her to feel like she\u2019s ready to record them. As Avanesov says, \u201cWriting on Komitas <\/strong>while living in Armenia is a task tantamount to rethinking the Scriptures.\u201d<\/p>\n When Mantashyan collaborate with Gerstein on Komitas\u2019s songs, \u201cAntuni\u201d (\u201cHomeless\u201d), a piece with deep resonance among the Armenian diaspora, was recorded in a single take then left unedited. \u201cIt\u2019s not about perfection,\u201d she said of the music. \u201cIt\u2019s about pain.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n