Concerto Khachaturian, A

International Music Company presents Aram Khachaturian's 'Concerto' edited for flute and piano by Jean-Pierre Rampal. This concerto is a transcription of the Violin Concerto, transcribed by Rampal at the suggestion of the composer.

'Western audiences owe a great debt to Aram Khachaturian for helping to make them aware of the colorful folk music of the Caucasus. Though he does not employ actual folk melodies in his music, Kharchaturian, who was born in Tiflis, Armenia, on June 6, 1903, writes mostly in the semi-oriental manner that characterizes the folk songs and dances of that area. Khachaturian did not begin to study music until he was nineteen, when he went to Moscow to live with his brother. He studied cello, theory, and composition at the music school operated by the composer Mikhail Gnessin, then, from 1929 to 1934, attended the Moscow Conservatory, where his composition teacher was Nikolai Miaskovsky. Since that time, Khachaturian has been very active as a composer and as a conductor, principally of his own music. Khachaturian and his family spent the summer of 1940 near Moscow; and during a period of two and a half months, he composed his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. When he arrived, he already had the basic plan of the Concerto established in his mind. 'I worked without an effort, sometimes my thoughts and imagination outraced the hand that was covering the staffs with notes,' he recalled to his biographer, Grigory Shneerson. 'The themes came to me in such abundance that I had a hard time of it putting them in some sort of order.' When the eminent French flutist, Jean-Pierre Rampal, approached Khachaturian to ask him to compose a concerto for flute and orchestra, Khachaturian suggested that the Violin Concerto would be adaptable for flute. It was, therefore, at the composer's own instigation that in 1968 Rampal made this transcription, at the same time providing his own cadenza as a substitute for the original violin cadenza in the first movement. The orchestral accompaniment throughout the Concerto remains unchanged.'

- Paul Affelder