“When Arshak Andriasov asked me if I could include the works of his father, Iosif Andriasov, in my recital, my curiosity led me to look online to better understand the composer. Understanding the “whole” life of the person, for me, was necessary, and in this way I would better understand the “part” of his work that I would be playing. I researched about Iosif Andriasov’s life and was shocked by the number of disciplines he was interested in and was developing throughout his life: as antagonistic disciplines such as poetry and karate, science and boxing, and how deeply it related to the world of music composition. Those antagonistic disciplines, I thought, is what made Iosif Andriasov the composer that he was. But through this approach, it was difficult for me to fully understand Iosif Andriasov as a composer. What did it mean that a composer devoted so much time, effort and energy to such different issues and devote so much time to composing?
I stopped noticing the information and elevated my point of view, which led me to understand that only a love of life and a great spiritual person was capable to fit all the information I had collected. This was the right starting point to understand the composer, and indeed this is what served as my guide to get close to his pieces “Meditation” and Horn Concerto. Two works that, although not of great technical complexity for the horn player, does imply a very large interpretative complexity to it.
All this takes shape when you practice Iosif’s music. These compositions are not the usual horn pieces, where the composer writes fragments with which the horn player has to fight technically to make a clean performance, suffer in some awkward tessitura, or face passages that are a nightmare the day before the concert. Iosif Andriasov did not view music in this manner (to make it difficult for the musician), but wrote music with the intention of the interpreter to feel alive and happy to be there at that moment to convey these feelings to the listener. I found the music so difficult to interpret, because one of the things we find most difficult in this life is to open our heart to others. This is in my opinion the secret of Iosif Andriasov’s legacy left in his works.”
andriasovstore 