Dilijan, the Armenian-themed chamber music series at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School, LA, ended its season with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, Opus 132 he titled Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode, for its annual concert “In Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.”
The quartet also closed the final music event of the JapanOC Festival with an appearance by the Tokyo String Quartet, presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County in the small Samueli Theater. No mention was made in the program of the travails by the Japanese in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But in the lobby of the adjoining Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, schoolchildren were fashioning origami cranes as a fundraiser to help the people of Japan.
Beethoven’s job was large. These two tragedies, nearly a century apart, require different responses. Japan works toward the immediate relief from suffering caused by an act of nature. Armenia’s old wounds, the result of cultural conflict, are now psychic, and the cure is the compassion of history, says an article in Los Angeles Times.
What Beethoven’s quartet offered Dilijan was the concept that differences can be reconciled. What it provided the Tokyo Quartet was not only the promise of “new strength,” but how unspeakably marvelous that new strength feels when it arises out of hopelessness.
The Dilijan performers were violinist Movses Pogossian, a superb solo violinist and chamber musician with a keenness for new music, and three members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic – violinist Varty Manouelian, principal violist Carrie Dennis and principal cellist Peter Stumpf.
The Tokyo, formed in 1969, still retains one original member, violist Kazuhide Isomura, and Kikuei Ikeda has been second violinist since 1974. The non-Japanese members, Canadian first violinist Martin Beaver and British cellist Clive Greensmith joined in 2002 and 2000, respectively.
