Hovhaness Piano Works – Berkofsky

Alan Hovhaness remains one of American music’s great unresolved arguments. Prolific to a degree that invites suspicion—he composed well over four hundred works, then destroyed a substantial portion of his early catalog in a fit of dissatisfaction, then kept writing anyway—he has always attracted a particular kind of devotee: patient, curious, willing to follow a long modal line wherever it decides to go. Peter Christ’s Crystal Records has served that devotion faithfully for decades, and this release, gathering recordings centered on Martin Berkofsky’s authoritative readings of some demanding mid-century scores, makes a genuine case for a side of Hovhaness that casual listeners rarely encounter.

That side is dark. Agitated. Dissonant in ways that jar against the composer’s reputation as a purveyor of mystical serenity.

The Concerto for Two Pianos from 1954 is the revelation here. Hovhaness in this period was navigating between his Armenian heritage—he had spent years studying the liturgical music of the Komitas tradition—and a modernist severity that owed something to Bartók and perhaps more to his own restless intelligence. The concerto’s Andante deploys long, sinuous woodwind and violin lines against the two pianos, which function less as soloists in any conventional sense than as a kind of hieratic presence, delivering harsh, stony dissonances into the texture like blows struck on marble. The strings underneath throb and thrum with an almost physical urgency. It is not comfortable music. The final Moderato offers something like consolation—but only briefly, only partially, before the dissonant swirl reasserts itself. Think of the Odysseus and Vishnu symphonies rather than the more emollient St. Vartan, and you will have the right emotional register.

Berkofsky is nobody’s amateur in this repertoire. He recorded the concerto for piano, four trumpets and percussion back in the 1970s, along with the Mount Chungara sonata and the 1944 Fantasy—a body of work that established him as a Hovhaness interpreter of real consequence. His touch here has the quality that Hovhaness’s best performances require: absolute rhythmic commitment without rigidity, a willingness to let the music’s modal atmosphere accumulate without pushing it toward either romanticism or academic neutrality.

The Three Pieces for two pianos—Berkofsky joined in the first by Atakan Sari, in the other two by Sergei Podobedov—come as genuine relief after the concerto’s sustained intensity. The writing reminded me immediately of the folk-inflected piano miniatures of Komitas Vartaped, that priest-composer who did for Armenian folk melody what Bartók did for Hungarian: dignified it, distilled it, made it available to the concert hall without stripping it of its earth. The brief middle piece especially has this quality, its hypnotic treble chiming against a bass line that anchors everything to something older and deeper. There is something—and I realize this sounds improbable—almost Baxian about the voicing, that extreme separation of registers that Arnold Bax loved and used to such atmospheric effect.

Vijag (1946) pushes forward with a quick, repetitive carillon pattern that anticipates, with uncanny directness, the processes Steve Reich would develop two decades later. This is not a coincidence you can easily dismiss.

Then Lousadzak—the title means “the coming of light” in Armenian—brings the sitar’s modal world into contact with North African sway, the piano supplying momentum and propulsive energy beneath the atmospheric surface. It sits somewhere between the concerto’s vanguard severity and the folk intimacy of the Three Pieces, and it works.

Andrei Ikov’s trumpet solo in the Prayer of St. Gregory is assertive, forward-moving, urgent in a way that avoids the trap of piety that this music sometimes falls into in more reverential hands. The interpretation stays in contact with pulse throughout.

Is any of this essential listening for someone unfamiliar with Hovhaness? Probably not—start with Mysterious Mountain or And God Created Great Whales and work your way in. But for anyone already persuaded that this composer repays sustained attention, this disc fills in a genuinely important corner of the picture. The Hovhaness who wrote the 1954 concerto was not serene. He was struggling with something, and it shows in every dissonant bar.

That’s worth hearing.