Hotel at the End of the World is the second volume of compositions by Sofia Ganeshian, a mysterious figure in the world of 20th-century avant-garde music, as interpreted by Swedish violinist Eva Lindal and American pianist Virg Dzurinko. Ganeshian was born in Armenia in 1899 to a Greek mother and an Armenian father. She spent her late childhood and early adulthood in Locarno, Switzerland. After the Second World War, she traveled throughout Europe and eventually found her way to the Greek island of Corfu, where she remained until she died in 1987.
The first volume of Ganeshian’s compositions, The Hidden Music of Sofia G.(Sharakan Music, 2021) presented compositions that were written from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s. The compositions in the second volume were written from 1950 onward, after she settled in Greece, according to Ganeshian’s notes and diary entries. The second album was recorded at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn in June 2022.
Ganeshian’s unconventional and experimental approach to notations often lacks specific instrumental designations and includes unusual graphic and eccentric symbols and sometimes cryptic notes. She never had any desire – or opportunity – to hear her compositions performed. Lindal and Dzurinko concluded that she approached composition with a freedom that set her apart from her contemporaries. «She did what she had to do. And she did it on her own terms», they write in their liner notes.
Hotel at the End of the World offers Ganeshian’s exquisite and enigmatic compositions she wrote with an imagined ballet in mind, quoting from Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s famous poem «Tristia» that explored the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice: «I have studied the science of departure / In the nights’ sorrows with hair unbound. Who can know when the word farewell is spoken / What kind of separation is at hand?». The turbulent «Pietri del Drago» refers to the thousands of years old, mysteriously carved stone monoliths scattered throughout the Armenian Highlands. The dramatic, story-like «Khosrovidukht» is titled after one of the earliest known female musicians and composers, an 8th-century Armenian princess who was abducted by invaders and spent twenty years in isolation, but this violent experience did not inform her liturgical music. The title piece «Albergo alla Fine del Mondo» suggests another mysterious and imaginative story. Ganeshian’s «Sarakan» compositions – hymns – differ from each other only slightly. Other compositions are minimalist and austere and focus on Ganeshian’s great interest in microtonality.
Lindal and Dzurinko do justice to the one-of-its-kind work of Ganeshian, with great sensitivity, captivating and masterful command and arresting imagination.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eva Lindal (violin), Virg Dzurinko (piano), Andrea Wolper (vocals)
