An intriguing snapshot of a prolific composer
The Strad Issue: October 2025
Description: An intriguing snapshot of a prolific composer
Musicians: Zina Schiff (violin) Valerie Stark (piano) Salzburg Chamber Soloists/Avlana Eisenberg
Works: Hovhaness: Violin Concerto no.2; Yeraz; Khirgiz Suite; Les Baux; Violin Sonata, Three Visions of Saint Mesrob; Varak; Oror
Catalogue number: NAXOS 8.559957
With a tally of around 500 works (including no fewer than 67 symphonies), there’s plenty that remains little known among the prolific output of Alan Hovhaness, one of the most singular figures in 20th-century American music with his blend of bracing simplicity, melodic power and spiritual mysticism that often draws deeply on his Armenian heritage.
California-born violinist Zina Schiff offers a rich collection of some of Hovhaness’s many pieces for strings, centred around his typically idiosyncratic Second Violin Concerto (1951–7), which feels more like a collection of seven brief character pieces than a conventional concerto.
Schiff, however, charts a convincing arc from its chugging rhythms to its radiant closing ‘Hymn’ in playing that’s bright and agile, if sometimes a little uneven, with gutsy support from the Salzburg Chamber Soloists.
In the collection of chamber works that follow, Schiff brings passion and sustained intensity to the solo-violin Yeraz and offers a beautifully throaty, rhapsodic account of Hovhaness’s sumptuous op.1, Oror.
Elsewhere, performances could perhaps do with a little more drama to bring Hovhaness’s sometimes disarming simplicity truly to life – whether in the East-meets-West collisions of the Violin Sonata or the haunting Three Visions of Saint Mesrob. Nonetheless, it’s a disc of revelations and quiet conviction, with appropriately rich, resonant sound.
DAVID KETTLE
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