From Russia to Iran: Pianist Tara Kamangar Travels 'East of Melancholy'

Pianist Tara Kamangar has done her homework. Not only has she put together, with her new album "East of Melancholy," a luxuriously lovely recital of virtuoso piano music—and executed it with spectacular aplomb—she has curated it with a acute and subtle awareness of the connections between musical traditions.

Kamangar's liner notes cite the scholar Richard Taruskin, who observed how much of Russia's musical identity in the 19th century and after is tied to exoticized representations of its neighbors to the south. Here, Mikhail Glinka—the original Russian composer, mentor to Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov—kicks off the album with his song The Lark in a transcription by another of his pupils, Mily Balakirev, and Kamangar traces his influence on the generations of Russian composers that followed, with extravagantly ornamented preludes by Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich.

But Kamangar also makes the intriguing proposition that composers from outside Russia, seeking to define their home countries musically, looked for their reflection in this same deforming, scintillating mirror of exoticism, and her program here makes a strong case for it. 

From the familiar canon, she offers excerpts from Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian's ballet Spartacus in her own arrangement, complemented by movements from the music of contemporary Iranian composer Aminollah Hossein and from the Fantastic Dances of Armenian-Iranian composer Loris Tjeknavorian, plus the title track by the Iranian-American Kamangar.

Of course, it is easy to believe that these pieces share a musical lineage when they are unified by pianism as consistent as Kamangar's. Her softly shaded chiaroscuro technique lends depth and warmth to the work of every composer in this collection, from the well-known Soviet masters to her singular Iranian finds.

This audio is no longer available.