Naghash Ensemble

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Something goes quiet in you when a singer opens her mouth in the language your grandparents argued in. Los Angeles holds the largest Armenian community outside Armenia, and most of what reaches a concert hall here is either careful folkloric preservation or straight diaspora nostalgia. This is neither. Composer John Hodian took the poems of Mkrtich Naghash, a fifteenth-century priest who wrote about exile while he was living it, set them for three female vocalists against duduk, oud, dhol and piano, and then let the whole thing build like a rock record rather than resolve like a hymn. The duduk is a double-reed pipe carved from apricot wood, and it sounds so close to a human voice at the edge of crying that it works on people who do not speak a single word of Armenian. It plays the Bram Goldsmith Theater on Wednesday, November 18 at 7:30pm in Beverly Hills. Six hundred years turns out to be no distance at all when the subject is missing home.