The importance in Armenian culture of Komitas (1869-1935), priest-monk, composer, arranger, transcriber, conductor, can hardly be overestimated. The accuracy of his ear was celebrated: he was the first systematically to arrange Armenian chant into a polyphonic version that was not simply a collection of things from here and there, and his transcriptions of western Armenian folk music effectively saved the tradition from extinction. In addition, he is considered a martyr of the Genocide, his mental health being broken after being deported to the Turkish interior in 1915; the last 20 years of his life were tragically entirely unproductive.

The Divine Liturgy (Patarag) was first published in 1933 and set for male voices. The present recording is an arrangement for mixed choir by the outstanding composer Vache Sharafyan (b1966), and, though it is not the first attempt so to transform the work, it presents in many respects a radically new view of it. Komitas’s setting is, to the Western ear, an intriguing mixture of free-flowing melisma with drones (frequently multi-part) and what one might perceive to be a kind of neo-Baroque counterpoint. Arranged so as to include soprano and alto voices, then, it necessarily includes many doublings of notes, given that the three- and four-part original is harmonically complete in itself.

Very often this results in moments of great beauty, and it is the perfect vehicle for the sound of the Latvian Radio Choir – ‘Chosen of God’, with the priest’s intonation, is a good example of this. Sometimes, however, in spite of the beauty of the sound itself, one feels that the sopranos especially are there to provide a rich halo of sound which is, to say the least, very curious to anyone already acquainted with the original. It is a treatment that brings it in some ways close to a composer such as Chesnokov, and when the ‘Sanctus’ begins one even begins to imagine 20th-century Anglican music, which one would certainly not think of when listening to the original male-voice version! That aesthetic is to be glimpsed in moments such as the beginning of the ‘Annunciation of the Procession’, in which the Latvian singers’ enjoyment of the elaborate melodic writing accompanied by drone is more than evident.

The final impression of this Armenian-Latvian collaboration is overwhelmingly positive. It is a new vision of Komitas’s work, and will certainly bring it to new audiences. The choir’s performance, under Sigvards Kļava’s sure direction, is outstanding, and the contributions of both Armen Badalyan as deacon and Hovhannes Nersesyan as priest are everything that one would expect.