An emotional link to a nation’s past

Their program includes music by Mansurian as well as his arrangements of songs by Komitas Vartabed, the composer and musicologist who is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in Armenian classical music. Before he was arrested and deported in 1915, Komitas (the name is sometimes written Gomidas) spent years traveling the countryside, notating and arranging thousands of the folk and religious songs he heard. Both Kashkashian and Mansurian are of Armenian descent, and it was those songs - an invaluable link to the country’s history - that brought the two together.

Speaking by phone, Kashkashian recalls playing some arrangements of Komitas’s songs in the late 1980s; to get what she calls “a more or less original take on them,’’ she traveled to Armenia to hear Mansurian play and sing them. The encounter was transformative.

“I was so entranced by what he was doing,’’ she says. “It was so powerful, so potent that I took a little tape recording of the event with me to Munich,’’ the home of ECM Records, Kashkashian’s label. There she played the tape for two colleagues: Manfred Eicher, ECM’s founder, and Schulkowsky, with whom Kashkashian worked frequently.

“And we sat there, all of us, with tears in our eyes,’’ the violist remembers. “Because it was so spectacular and for us something intimate and powerful and unique. And at that time we said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this.’ ’’

What resulted was a 2003 recording called “Hayren,’’ in which the trio played Komitas’s arrangements and Mansurian’s own works. On the recording, Mansurian’s voice sounds raw and almost painfully constricted, a world away from what you would expect from a trained singer. It’s unusual enough that in the program he’s credited with “vocals’’ instead of “singing.’’ But the appeal, says Kashkashian, lies in something deeper.

“The rawness which you hear, and the unpracticed quality, really let through the incredible depth of emotion and knowledge of the people, of the land, of the circumstances of the nation - its blood,’’ she says. “I really believe that it’s something that needs to be heard.’’

What Komitas did was to bring the ancient past into a form that modern Armenians - and Westerners - could understand and embrace. In a way, Kashkashian says, Mansurian’s own music does the same thing. “We talk about him as a contemporary European-trained composer with all those techniques at his disposal,’’ she explains. “But we’re also talking about him as being rooted in the Armenian church and folk music of the past. So when I hear a piece of Tigran’s, I get both things. It’s like a red thread that goes through all his music.’’

Tuesday’s concert opens with three Taghs, ancient religious chants that Mansurian has fashioned for viola and percussion. Also on the program are two groups of Komitas’s songs, four of Mansurian’s own songs transcribed for viola and piano, and a lengthy duet for Kashkashian and Schulkowsky. “You notice how everything feeds on everything else,’’ Kashkashian says. “You definitely sense the flavor of the nation, the flavor of the geography, both emotional and physical, in all the works - in the ones that were written two years ago as well as the ones that were a couple centuries ago.’’

If that’s the case, it will be due not only to Komitas and Mansurian but also to Kashkashian’s unique voice. Over the course of her career she has created an uncommonly expressive tone - shadowy yet lyrical - from the most introverted of string instruments. It’s most clearly evident in her two most recent recordings: “Asturiana,’’ a 2007 collection of song transcriptions with Robert Levin, and “Neharot,’’ a diverse, darkly beautiful collection of orchestral and chamber music released earlier this year.

Asked about her tone, Kashkashian is modest to a fault, preferring to frame her explanation in universal terms.

“The thing that any musician is trying to do is to take the expressive tool offered them and say something that is, on the one hand, as true to the composer as possible, and on the other, that expresses the deepest, innermost regions of their own hearts. It just takes a great deal of objectivity and an unbelievable amount of vulnerability and courage to open yourself. And to do those two things together, and to keep some truth in the affair - it’s not easy. But I think that’s what all of us are striving for.’’

Information: www.necmusic.edu/kashkashian-hayren.