GLENDALE, Calif. — For more than 15 years, the Dilijan Chamber Music Concert Series occupied a distinctive space in Los Angeles’ chamber-music ecosystem. Presented at the Colburn School and rooted in the city’s Armenian cultural community and Hollywood’s classical-music industry, the series paired standard repertoire with works by Armenian composers and maintained an active commissioning program. Covid brought that activity to a halt; programs were canceled, premieres postponed, and the series briefly risked losing continuity.
Dilijan returned in 2024 under the auspices of the Lark Musical Society music, dance, and arts school in Glendale, 10 miles north of Colburn. The concerts are presented under the artistic leadership of Evgeny Tonkha, whose father, cellist Vladimir Tonkha, inspired several works by Sofia Gubaidulina. The 2025–26 season consists of four concerts: two in November, two in March.
The emeritus artistic leader and Dilijan founder Movses Pogossian introduced the Nov. 23 concert that included material delayed for 2,043 days due to the pandemic, Armenian sounds long associated with Dilijan, and a memorial for cellist Antonio Lysy, whose death at age 60 in 2024 resonated with colleagues and a community for whom he had performed every season since the series began.
The afternoon opened with Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho Suite, conducted by Johannes Eberhart and played by a 17-member string ensemble featuring a number of students from UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music in Westwood, 20 miles southwest. The performance caught the intense foreboding in the music’s sharp, neurotic contours, and was reasonably blood-curdling.
The program shifted into repertoire central to the series’ identity with the 15-minute Fantasy on Tigran Mansurian’s Film Music for clarinet and strings by Martin Ulikhanyan, widely regarded as Armenia’s most influential living composer. Drawn from four film scores and lasting about 15 minutes, the suite had been scheduled for premiere in 2020 and has since been recorded. Its long, sinuous lines and modal inflections were given a seductive performance by clarinetist Phil O’Connor and the VEM String Quartet, UCLA Armenian Music Program’s resident ensemble, led by violinist Pogossian with violinist Ally Cho, violist Damon Zavala, and cellist Niall Tarō Ferguson.
The first half concluded with the world premiere of the very last Dilijan commission, a gently swirling, impressionist video created by young filmmaker Alik Barsoumian to accompany a live performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde Prelude featuring choreography and performances by Michelle Thompson Ulerich and Gregory Dolbashian, a sextet led by Pogossian with violinist Varty Manouelian, violists Che Yen Chen and Paul Coletti, and cellists Ben Hong (associate principal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and newly tenured at UCLA) and Yoshika Masuda.
Introducing the short tribute to Lysy, Pogossian recalled his performance of the “incredibly difficult” Khachaturian Sonata from memory and a Yerevan concert given under challenging physical conditions. The source material fore the video was Lysy’s performance, played with precision and abandon, of Mansurian’s Allegro Barbaro. Made in 2014, it reflected his importance to the series and the inspiration he continues to provide.
The second half featured Korngold’s String Sextet in a reading that was cohesive, well-paced, and attentive to the composer’s early style — precocious, impatient, and intermittently stunning. The performance brought to mind past Dilijan seasons: Violist Coletti had played in the inaugural year, and cellist Masuda had played in the final pre-pandemic programs, reinforcing the continuity the series is gradually rebuilding.
The Dilijan series’ first concert Nov. 4 had featured Alexander Arutiunian’s Suite for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano with Boris Allakhverdyan, Luanne Homzy, and Alin Melik-Adamyan, and Haydn’s Piano Trio in G major with Homzy taking delightful liberties based on her studies of gypsy music in Budapest. Tonkha and Melik-Adamyan played Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro with dreamy, lyrical passion, and the concert concluded with a gentle performance of Brahms’ Clarinet Trio.
