Armenian pianist Şahan Arzruni has stacks of handwritten manuscripts from his longtime friendship with the American-Armenian composer Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000). On the album Alan Hovhaness: Selected Piano Compositions (Kalan Music), Arzruni recorded a collection of these works, nearly all world premieres of unpublished scores. He says the compositions date from the 1940s and early 1950s. Arzruni writes in the liner notes: “Alan Hovhaness was a musician-mystic who rejected the materialistic values of the Machine Age. He explored, instead, the transcendental realm—using music as a link between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Hovhaness took non-Western cultures as his point of departure, while employing the tools of Western music as his frame of reference.”
Alan Hovhaness: Selected Piano Compositions – Şahan Arzruni
