GURDJIEFF ENSEMBLE (Armēnija) koncerts

The internationally acclaimed Gurdjieff Ensemble was founded by Levon Eskenian to play ethnographically authentic arrangements of the G.I. Gurdjieff/Thomas de Hartmann piano music. The Ensemble consists of leading musicians playing Armenian and Middle Eastern traditional instruments. Their debut album on the famous ECM records, “Music of Georges.I. Gurdjieff”, was widely acclaimed, and won prestigious awards including the Edison Award in the Netherlands.

G.I.Gurdjieff is known to many in the West as one of the major spiritual figures of the 20th century.  He was a musician, philosopher, choreographer, and writer, and his extensive musical repertoire was based on the music he heard while traveling in Armenia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and many parts of Central Asia, India and North Africa, where he witnessed a myriad of folk and spiritual music, rituals and dance traditions.

With their second album, “Komitas”, also on ECM records, Eskenian and his musicians turn their attention to the music of Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935). Composer, ethnomusicologist, arranger, singer and priest, Komitas is popularly held to be the founder of contemporary music in Armenia, and in his work as a collector he explored the connections that uniquely bind together Armenian sacred and secular music.

The pieces that Eskenian has collected and rearranged for traditional instruments, created with an eye towards preserving their authenticity, allows the Gurdjieff Ensemble, performing on more than 16 traditional Armenian and Eastern instruments, to illuminate the deep roots of Komitas’s and Gurdjieff’s works.

The Ensemble has been touring the world with sold out concerts at major festivals and concert halls in Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Russia and South America.  The Ensemble has performed in such prestigious festivals and venues as the Holland Festival, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Bozar Center in Brussels, the Morgenland Festival in Germany, the Albert Hall in Canberra, the Imago Dei Festival in Austria, the Gulbenkian Hall in Lisbon and many others.