Mary Kouyoumdjian has described herself as a ‘composer and documentarian’, but there is certainly more to the Armenian-American’s creative armoury than musical reportage. Witness accounts, field recordings and old gramophone songs are fused with string quartet sounds to create a series of powerful, poignant soundtracks where each element plays an equally important role in the final result.

Containing three compositions memorialising tragic events that took place during the past century, ‘Witness’ opens with a nostalgic and bittersweet rendition of the Armenian folk song ‘Groung’ (this acts as a connecting thread throughout) before moving to the hard-hitting, earth-shattering Bombs of Beirut. The three-movement work interweaves live and recorded materials to recount the death and destruction caused by the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. An uneasy, queasy calmness surrounds the air in ‘Before the War’. The second movement launches into war itself – a chaotic, Guernica-like sonic frenzy of exploding bombs, tangled limbs and rapid machine-gun fire. When the chaos subsides in ‘After the War’, only emptiness and resignation remain among the rubble and ruins, punctuated by whimpering sounds on string glissandos.

A more direct approach is taken in I Haven’t the Words – Kouyoumdjian’s response to George Floyd’s murder in 2020 – where sadness is distilled through a steady stream of falling string lines, delicate expression giving way once more to untrammelled anger, rage and indignation.

The most striking work on ‘Witness’, however, is Silent Cranes. Completed in 2015 to mark the centennial commemoration of the Armenian genocide that took place during the First World War, its title draws again on the folk song ‘Groung’. A haunting cello melody in A minor heard at the beginning of the first movement is juxtaposed with an extraordinary recording of the folk song made in New York in 1917 by exiled Armenian singer Zabelle Panosian (recorded around the same time that the horrific events were unfolding in Armenia). The witness accounts given during Silent Cranes’ third movement are particularly graphic in their shocking detail. Kouyoumdjian’s music is at its most effective when heightening the words and descriptions of survivor’s testimonies, capturing the raw emotion that gives voice to their fears and uncertainties. With the Kronos Quartet in excellent form throughout, ‘Witness’ is a salutary reminder that – as Atom Egoyan observes in the booklet notes – music can provide a last refuge for humanity during times of loss and trauma, offering a glimmer of hope for a better future and lasting peace.