Khachaturian Trio Brings It Home

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IMG. Khachaturian Trio

By: Aida Aydinyan


As an audience member you feel at home, physically, mentally and emotionally when all the pieces of a concert magically and perfectly come and fit together…this is what happened last night at Koerner Hall with the Khachaturian Trio-they brought it home and not only for Armenians.

On October 20th, the trio Armine Grigorian (piano), Karen Shahgaldian (violin), and Karen Kocharian (cello) made their Canadian debut.

The concert was spectacular to say the least: perfect technically, acoustically, musically, artistically but it was in no way over the top, there was an intricate balance of sustained and genuine emotion and deep musicality  in the expense of surface sentimentality, which is so tempting and easy to cross with a program comprised of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Khachauturian and Babajanian.

And the audience responded. And I mean not only over 900 Armenian audience members who were present but everyone else. One of those non-Armenian audience members, a charming lady in her late sixties, seating next to me mentioned that she didn’t know who the group was but this is truly one of the best concerts that she ever attended at Koerner Hall.

As if the perfect performance with a perfect program in a perfect concert hall weren’t enough, the Trio generously ended with not one but three beautiful Armenian anchor pieces by Babajanian, Komitas and Khachaturian, which swept away my final and weak attempt in trying to hold my tears and I just let them go…

I looked at my non-Armenian neighbor with an urge to explain who Komitas is but she was also in tears and there was nothing left to say – she, along with me and the rest of the audience members was also “at home”!