This album celebrates the acclaimed pianist-composer Hayk Melikyan’s longstanding fascination with the baroque era. It brings together works arranged by legendary transcribers—including Kempff, Busoni, Siloti, and Petri—and Melikyan himself, spanning arias, chorales, laments, and dances by Handel, J.M. Bach, J.S. Bach, Buxtehude, Vivaldi, Marcello, Pergolesi, and Scarlatti. Through these keyboard reimaginings, Melikyan lets the “breath” of Baroque music speak anew.

The pianist explains:

“Since 2004 I’ve been drawn to the art of opera transcription, crafting concert paraphrases for solo piano from Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Armenian national operas, among others. With the launch of my “1900+” series in 2009, I began shaping programs where 20th/21stcentury music is “broken” by a Baroque piece—a signature format that lets contrast reveal kinship. Baroque clarity often rests on shared tonal grammar and recognizable genres; modern and contemporary music, by contrast, tests or dissolves inherited form—the “shape” can be a metamorphosis, a process, a sound world, or a collage. Yet they meet at the piano in things that matter: the responsibility to phrase, time organized by pattern or rhythm, and the performer’s agency. Baroque ornament was codified improvisation; today that agency often shifts to timbre, touch, pacing, and even silence. Heard side by side, these languages don’t collide; they sharpen each other, making essentials more audible.

Between 2009–10 I also closely collaborated with opera singers, and that vocal sensibility has stayed in my hands at the keyboard. The countertenor repertory, in particular, led me toward my own piano transcriptions. During the Covid-19 years I transcribed an aria from Alessandro Scarlatti’s Tigrane for a Baroque-inspired project that acknowledges my Armenian roots: an Armenian pianist-composer meeting the Armenian king immortalized by Baroque masters (Tomaso Albinoni, Antonio Vivaldi, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and others).

After years of transcription both as a pianist and composer as well as a deepening dialogue with the voice, I chose this program to let Baroque breath speak through the piano alone, music of another century, heard now with a listener’s present tense.”

Hayk Melikyan