April 1, 2008 - 14:13 AMT
Komitas' Songs performance to be staged in Baltic House
Komitas' Songs performance will be staged in the Baltic House April 1, Rosbalt reported with a reference to press office of Saint Petersburg Committee on culture.

"All dance-lovers will have the possibility to see a performance nominated for Golden Mask award. Combination of modern choreography, Armenian folk music and dances makes the performance unusual and surprising," the press release says.

After success at High Fest film festival in Yerevan, Natalya Kasparova's dance group staged Komitas' Songs in Moscow, Arkhangelsk and Saint Petersburg.

Komitas, (Soghomon Soghomonyan), an Armenian priest, composer, choir leader, singer, music ethnologist, music pedagogue and musicologist was born in 1869 in Kutahya, Ottoman Empire.

In 1881 he entered Echmiadzin Seminary.

From 1910 he lived and worked in Constantinople. There he established a 300 member choir Gusan. On April 24, 1915, he was arrested and put to train the next day together with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Cankiri in northern Central Anatolia, at a distance of some 300 miles. He never fully recovered from these 15 days experience. As of autumn 1916, he was taken to a Turkish military hospital and he moved to Paris in 1919 where he died in a psychiatric clinic Villejuif in 1935. Next year his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.