Khachaturian: The Concertante Works for Piano

Little of 20th-century Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s music is well-known, outside of a few popular excerpts from his ballets Spartacus and Gayaneh. This album, however, deserves to change that. It features two of Khachaturian’s works for piano and orchestra, magnificently performed by the Jordanian pianist Iyad Sughayer. The slow movement of the 1936 Piano Concerto contains a cameo role for the ululating musical saw, while Sughayer nails the brittle, percussive finale with forensic precision. He is no less impressive in Khachaturian’s freewheeling Concerto-Rhapsody from 1967 and shows the more relaxed side of his musical personality in a sparky piano Suite from music written for Mikhail Lermontov’s play Masquerade.