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Magda Mkrtchyan
Has anyone heard of Magda?
She is a dramatic Soprano at Yerevan Opera and is considered one of the Armenian talents.
She has sung with Pavarotti, Domingo and in September 2006 sang for the Pope in The Vatican.
Pavarotti is quoted as saying that a voice like her's only comes once every hundred years.
I have been asked by Magda to try and help her gain more recognition for her talents.
Can anyone help?Comment
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MAGDA MKRTCHYAN
As far as i know she doen't have any solo albums or CD releases. But she is mentioned online in several articles and pages ...
As for her request to get more media coverage, the fastest way is to have her own website and a decent agent to get her deals.
I can offer these services steph, feel free to contact me for details.Comment
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"sang for the Pope in The Vatican."Originally posted by steph View Post
And I am reading...sang WITH the Pope
What about making a video with her for YouTube ? There will be many opera fans there...Comment
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General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”Comment
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Singer Zara "Dle yaman" Певица Зара(Zara Petrosyan)
At the beginning she says in Russian the song is devoted to the tragic events of 1988 in Armenia...
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Armenian Bookstore
It's probably known to most, but perhaps some aren't aware of :
We use it for Armenian pre-school books for the children (Eastern dialect), but they offer a wide range of subjects.
Priced in USD (good for us in UK just now!) ranging from 60 cents to a few dollars per book!
The postage & packing usually costs more than the 20 or so books you might order at anyone time.
Good books, good prices and putting a little money into RA rather than Ebay.Comment
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Armenia Is The Best In Europe
The Armenia weightlifting team stood out at the European Weightlifting Championships in Strasbourg. The team enjoyed 10 gold and 8 silver and bronze medals.
Armenian weightlifter Meline Daluzyan celebrated her gold medal in the women’s 63-kg category pressing. Inspired by Meline Daluzyan’s victory, Nazik Avdalyan won a silver medal in the 69-kg category and Hripsime Khurshudyan celebrated a gold medal in the 75-kg category. Khurshudyan won ahead of Russia's Tatiana Matveeva and Spain's Lidia Valentin.
Tigran Martirosyan became the vice-champion in the men's 69-kg weightlifting class.
Armenian lifers Ara Khachatryan and Gevorg Davtyan competed in the 77-kg category. On the whole, the Armenian sportsmen turned the European Championship into an Armenian Championship. They competed to gain the title of the European champion.
Eventually, Davtyan became the winner and became the champion of Europe for the second time. Ara Khachatryan enjoyed a bronze medal.
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International Herald Tribune Article
Armenia's artistic bridge from East to West
By Souren Melikian
Friday, April 27, 2007
PARIS: It is not easy to display the art of a major culture left in tatters by organized physical destruction over centuries that reduced its territory to a tiny fraction of its historical dimension. What mostly survives is the art of religion, the hard-core to which the persecuted cling and carry away if portable. Otherwise it is fragments collected from ruins. Hence the title of the Armenian art show on view at the Louvre until May 21 - "Armenia Sacra."
The exhibition book is as much about history as about art, a necessity when introducing a culture known to few other than specialists.
It might have been worth mentioning that Armenia had a very long past when King Tiridate made it the first country where Christianity was declared the state religion around 313, when Byzantium only made its worship permissible.
The origins of Armenia are steeped in mystery. How the Armenians, whose language is Indo-European, substituted themselves for the non-Indo-European inhabitants of the preceding kingdom of Urartu around the 7th century B.C. is unexplained. If there was a fusion of two groups, history says nothing about it.
Armenia was included in the empire founded by the Persian Achaemenid dynasty in the mid-6th century B.C. and from the beginning had close links to Iranian culture while maintaining an utterly different identity. Some magnificent silver wine horns in Achaemenid style, excavated in Armenia after World War II, are usually described as Iranian and yet they can be seen at a glance to be aesthetically different from the vessels excavated in Iran. This Iranian connection persisted through time. Linguists say that well over a third of words in the Armenian vocabulary today are of Iranian origin, ranging from Parthian Pahlavi of the late 2nd or 1st century B.C. to present-day Persian.
The other part of the world to which Armenia had ties was the Roman Empire - the land was split again and again between Iran and Rome, later replaced in the East by the Byzantine Empire.
This twin connection with East and West remained perceptible throughout Armenian history.
It was the case with the first art spawned by the advent of Christianity of which the earliest surviving fragments do not predate the 5th century A.D. However disparate these look stylistically, they mostly share a monumental quality and an austere gravity maintained even when startling irony creeps in. Figural art, sometimes rough, invariably explodes with vigor. On one capital of starkly geometrical shape from Dvin, a Virgin and Child carved in low relief stare hypnotically at the viewer. It has a Romanesque feel to it but is not later than the 5th or 6th century A.D.
The stem of a stone cross also from Dvin is topped by the head of Jesus in a style strangely reminiscent of the human masks found in early 1st millennium B.C. bronzes from Luristan, in western Iran.
This aesthetic diversity was maintained into the 7th century A.D. if the datings suggested by art historians are right. Sacred art and irony continued to be paradoxically associated. In a roundel carved in sunken relief, Jesus ascends into heaven, standing in a mandorla held up by two angels while worshippers below raise their hands in prayer. All have incongruous goggle eyes - again these call to mind the art of Luristan with its funny human heads topping bronze ensigns. No archaeological context throws light on this intriguing sculpture.
But even a documented context does not necessarily resolve enigmas. On a huge stone capital nearly two meters, or six and a half feet, long recovered from the church at Zvartnots, an eagle spreads its wings horizontally. This is a distant offshoot of Roman iconography, with some input from Sasanian Iran. Its meaning in a church remains open to speculation.
Iranian reminiscences kept surfacing in early Armenian art as they do in two 6th or 7th century folios inside a 10th century Gospel from Echmiadzin. Syria, inspired the triangular tops flanking the rounded arch of a niche, but the outfits of the Magi are borrowed from late Sasanian conventions, as the art historian André Grabar noted long ago.
Riddles continue to stake out the evolution of Armenian art well into the 9th century. Wooden capitals from a church at Sevan, which were published long ago, induced one of the contributors to the exhibition book, Yvetta Mkrichian, to characterize their shape as "singular." They actually relate to models found later in the domestic architecture of Iranian Central Asia. The carved pattern draws its motifs from the repertoire of contemporary Iran and transforms them aesthetically. Again one wonders what meaning these had in the context of an Armenian church. One of them, hitherto unrecognized, reproduces the eagle wings of the Sasanian royal headdress as seen by artists from Islamic Iran. The key to such riddles surely lies in Armenian and Persian literature.
One of the great masterpieces in the exhibition, the A.D. 1134 wooden doors and their frame removed from the Monastery at Mush (pronounced "moosh") shows that the link with Iranian art kept being renewed at intervals. The commentator in the exhibition book appears to be unaware that the figural scenes featuring two jousting horsemen and two other mounted heroes on the lintel deal with Iranian literary themes, as do the two rounds of animals carved on each side. The geometrical patterns in the main areas could again be seen as part of an Iranian rather than Arab influence.
Aesthetically, the transformation is as obvious as the consummate mastery. This is a masterpiece in isolation that bears witness to an otherwise vanished school of architectural woodwork.
The confidence with which Armenian artists, from stone or wood carvers to painters and goldsmiths, borrowed from the outside world and recast the loans on their own terms is a feature shared by all powerful cultures from Iran to India to China. What makes Armenia astonishing is its eclecticism and its aptitude at welding together seemingly incompatible components.
A striking case is offered by the incorporation of formal Islamic patterns into Christian art. The early 13th-century cornice of one of those tall stelae with crosses carved in sunken relief known as "khachkar" is carved in the center with the figure of Jesus enthroned under a polylobed arch. On the book that Jesus holds open on his lap, the verse from John: 8.12 reads in its Armenian version: "I am the Light of the World." On either side, dazzling patterns of swirling scrolls have a rhythm and a complexity that makes them utterly different from those of Iran to the east or of the Arab areas of Iraq to the south.
This aptitude at creating afresh, however hybrid the mix, comes out most astonishingly in the manuscripts copied and illuminated in Cilicia along the Mediterranean shore of present-day Turkey.
A Franco-Armenian kingdom came into existence in the area following the wedding in the late 11th century of a French nobleman and an Armenian princess. By the 12th century it had a large population of Armenians driven away from their homeland by incessant warfare. For a century and a half or so, Cilicia became a second Armenia, leaving astonishing castles and ramparts that still stand at Yilankale or Anavarza and giving birth to an art of the book that blends Byzantine iconography, the color scheme of French medieval manuscripts and formal ornament from Islamic Iran.
A lectionary copied in 1286, perhaps in the town of Sis, offers a remarkable example of this blending of artistic syncretism.
Cilicia thus became the first true meeting ground of East and West, relatively immune from the violent antagonism that characterized it in Sicily and Spain. The Cilician experience probably paved the way to the easy transition that some Armenians made to the West, creating an even more hybrid art of the book in places such as Perugia in Italy.
Cilician art also traveled back East. It left its imprint on the Gospel illuminated in 1323 at Glajor in the Siunik Province to the northwest of Iran. But the painter, Toros of Taron, owes to Syrian book painting from the time the baroque rockery and plants - which the exhibition book does not say.
Internationalism began centuries ago and few practiced it with greater alacrity in art than the Armenians.General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”Comment
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General Bagramyan featured on Wikipedia today 5/9/07
General Bagramyan featured on Wikipedia today 5/9/07
General Antranik (1865-1927): “I am not a nationalist. I recognize only one nation, the nation of the oppressed.”Comment
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