KARLSRUHE, Germany — At the 10th European Chamber Music Competition Karlsruhe, held on September 24-26 in the German city of that name, pianist Hasmik Sarukian and cellist Egon Buchner — the Komitas Duo — earned second prize. The competition for up-and-coming young musicians, which has been held semi-annually (with two exceptions) since 2005, is organized by the city of Karlsruhe and the Max Reger Institute located there.
The Karlsruhe University of Music sponsors the competition and composer Wolfgang Rihm was its patron until his death in July 2024. Rihm was a native of Karlsruhe and lived and taught composition at the University of Music. It is named after one of the initiators of the competition, a musician and former rector of the Academy. The artistic director of the event is Prof. Saule Tatubaeva.
The successful performance marked a major step forward in the career of the Komitas Duo, itself a very new partnership between two young and promising musicians. It also has contributed to bringing knowledge of Armenian music to a German audience.
This writer had the opportunity to experience a performance by the Komitas Duo, prior to their successful participation in the European competition. It was the first of two concerts in September in Mainz, a city on the Rhine. Under the rubric “The Romantic Idea,” the duo presented works by Max Weber, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven, and concluded with an Impromptu by Alexander Arutiunian. The concerts were, in a sense, dress rehearsals for the competition; pieces they performed would be scrutinized by the jury weeks later.
As the two explained, the notion of Romanticism, originally associated with certain narrative forms in vernacular literature, came to express an aesthetic concept that thrusts the subjective and emotional into central focus, especially the sense of longing for love; their program sought to present its various facets, not only as a specific period, but as a mood or spiritual attitude. Thus, the composers included Max Reger, whose “late-romantic realm of expression anticipates transition to the modern world.” And although he deliberately avoided external attributes of romantic music, Claude Debussy, in his Sonata for Cello and Piano, which they performed, is thematically related, especially in its symbolism and subjectivity.
As cellist Buchner related with humor, the piece has been interpreted as a reflection of the adventure of one Pierrot Lunaire, in what is almost a musical play: the melancholic, sensitive Commedia dell’arte-type character awakens entranced in a dream, strives to win over the moon as his beloved, and, unrequited, sings an ironical hymn to freedom. Beethoven’s 7 Variations on a Theme from Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” is presented as “a romantic idea illuminated by a classical perspective.”
