April Showers

The month of April began with an afterparty at Ararat restaurant till about 1:30 am following our March 31 debut as the ZePure trio. This long awaited event took place at the Glendale Presbyterian Church, with an audience of about 400 people. The hall has exceptional acoustics for chamber concerts, which I witnessed while attending a concert by the Komitas quartet.

This was our first performance as the trio, and through trials and tribulations we were able to finally share our work with our long awaited audience. The program, entitled Armenian Rhapsody, featured many well known as well as lesser known works by Armenian composers. We began by playing some very mysterious pieces by Komitas on Saxophone and piano, with the magnificent Chika Inoue. After this set we performed some well known pieces by Aram Khachaturian as Maksim Velichkin joined us with his majestic cello tone. Sabre dance and Lezginka from Gayane ballet were the epitomes of this set, followed by film music composed by one of the most versatile Armenian composers, Arno Babajanian.

Although I arranged most of the pieces in the first half of the program, the second half of the program consisted of many other Armenian composers, such as Baghdassarian, Avetisyan, Sayat Nova, Manaseryan, Davtyan, Hovhannesyan, Shahen and others, some of which were arranged by Leon Thomasian.

At the end of the program the MC, Artavazd Amiryan introduced our guest artist, Brent Wilson (baritone), who sang three Armenian songs (his first time singing in the language), including two songs by Babajanian, and the hymn of the city of Yerevan, “Yerevan Erebuni” by E. Hovhanesyan, joined by the audience singing along on their feet. It was a great evening filled with lots of positive energy and many familiar faces. Click here for video of the concert.

Not less than 12 hours after the party in Ararat, we performed most of this program again on April 1st at the Glendale Brand Library, which was organized by Blair Whittington. This program was also received with a very enthusiastic audience, who thoroughly enjoyed the program.

April was an interestingly productive month for me filled with April showers and sweet May flowers. Not only did I turn 41, but also published an album featuring the tangos of Astor Piazzolla, entitled “Oblivion.” This album is available on all streaming services, including apple music, spotify, amazon and others. This project was interesting as well, since I got to work with an Argentinian arranger and composer, Raul Ferrando, who arranged four of the tango tracks with his own interpretation, Argentine flare and vast imagination. This album is also available on my website as a USB cassette, which can be purchased and will include a personalized signature.

This month I also worked with the Ventura College Opera and Musical Theatre, and did some things I had never imagined I would do. After performing the Durufle Requiem with the orchestra, I was assigned the task of controlling the multimedia visualizations of Jocelyn Hagen’s, “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.” This piece is written for orchestra, choir and video synchronization. My job was to follow the conductor, using MUSEIK software in order to synch the video with his baton. It was more difficult than I had hoped, but after 3 rehearsals and 2 performances I managed to get about 90% of the media synched with the orchestral performance.

Overall this month was filled with great music and some goals that were definitely achieved, and I am hoping that next month will be full of creative ideas, performances and opportunities to thrive as well. We have a new and exciting program brewing with the ZePure trio, which will be performed in the fall. Please subscribe to get next month’s newsletter.

P.S. I began training and plan to compete in a mini triathlon in the fall.