Asmik Grigorian - Dissonance - Gramophone

Grigorian is utterly compelling throughout. The mood is immediately set in the title-track, ‘Dissonance’, remembrance and the pain of parting expressed in the inflection of her voice and halting hesitations. The tormented numbers hit home strongly. She pushes hard in songs like ‘Believe me not, friend’, happy to trade beauty of tone for emotional truth. But she strikes the tenderest tone for ‘Child, thou art as beautiful as a flower’ and pares back her sound in the fragile ‘Twilight’ and the beautiful two verses of ‘Lilacs’. The most famous songs – ‘How fair this spot’ and ‘Sing not to me, beautiful maiden’ – come off movingly, although she does not ‘float’ the high note in the latter with ease. Her remembrances and sense of intoxication are compelling at the height of ‘In the silence of the secret night’.

Pianist Lukas Geniušas is an equal partner dramatically, a torrent of notes flooding ‘Spring Waters’ and echoing Grigorian’s joy in the ecstatic postlude to ‘What happiness’, Alpha’s recorded sound immediate and truthful.