Dilijan group weaves Armenian tapestry

A stated goal of the impressive Dilijan Chamber Music Series, now in its third season, has been to celebrate the riches of Armenian music and give a forum to Armenian musicians based in Los Angeles and beyond.

By blending Armenian music with that of other cultures, Dilijan (named after an Armenian resort city) weaves a tapestry of a larger culture.

That mission reached a high point Sunday afternoon at Zipper Hall with the U.S. premieres of three fascinating Armenian pieces, by Artur Avanesov, Eduard Hayrapetian and Tigran Mansurian (who was in the hall). Armenian strengths aside, the program was also neatly divided between Armenian and Hungarian music, and it was a Hungarian composer whose voice rose above the others.

Gyorgy Ligeti’s trio for horn, violin and piano, “Hommage a Brahms,” has an unfair advantage in that it is, as violinist and series director Movses Pogossian rightly told the crowd, a “crown jewel” of chamber music literature. Wisely, Pogossian programmed a seamless segue into the Ligeti out of Gyorgy Kurtag’s short, coolly evocative “Tre Pezzi.” That 1979 piece demonstrates Kurtag’s keen ability to suggest a dream state through music -- neither a pleasant nor a harsh dream but a place dislodged from rational reality.

Ligeti’s horn trio, played with mesmerizing aplomb by horn player Richard Todd, pianist Vicki Ray and Pogossian, was a stunner, surely one of the chamber music highlights of the season in the Southland. The Brahms connection is oblique, hinted at in phrasing and structural elements, but the harmonic language is Ligeti’s seductive tough talk, expressed in complex, surprising and cathartic sweeps of energy.

Avanesov, the youngest composer on the bill (born in 1980), projects a strong and sensitive assurance in “ . . . leise . . . “, a short piece for piano and clarinet played solidly by Armen Guzelimian and Phil O’Connor, respectively. A subtle and airy thing, it wafts on romantic and impressionistic influences, though clearly from a contemporary starting point, and it whetted one’s appetite for more from this promising composer.

Hayrapetian’s “Sonata for Two Violins and Piano,” circa 1988, craftily mixes a neo-Romantic spirit with tonalities and melodic synchronizations that move beguilingly in and out of focus. Violinists Pogossian and Endre Granat were the suitably dizzying conversationalists.

Mansurian has gained increasing attention in recent years, partly through his expanding international exposure via ECM recordings. What we heard, though, was a pocket-sized 1965 piece written when the composer was in his 20s. Mansurian’s “Little Suite,” played by Guzelimian, is an admixture of gnarly dissonance, folkish asides and otherwise Bartok-ish manners. It led naturally into the concert’s closer, Bartok’s “Contrasts.”

The most familiar piece of the afternoon, “Contrasts” is a melange of the composer’s classic modernism and jazzy flavorings, written for clarinetist Benny Goodman and violinist Josef Szigeti in 1938. Here, the exacting performing parties were O’Connor, Granat and Guzelimian.

To have a Bartok work as the closest thing to a war horse on a concert program says a lot about the courage and exploratory spirit of the Dilijan project. Keep an ear out.