Norayr Mnatsakanyan

Norayr Mnatsakanyan (Armenian: Նորայր Մնացականյան, Russian: Норайр Мнацаканян, January 7, 1923 – March 25, 1986) was a Meritorious Artist of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (honorary title awarded on December 2, 1965).

As a renowned vocal performer of Armenian traditional and gousan music, Norayr Mnatsakanyan has become one of the most influential vocalists in the canon of Armenian traditional music. Owing to his dainty operatic baritone, profound knowledge of Armenian folk music, and his mastery of the Armenian language and Armenian literature, Norayr Mnatsakanyan was highly acclaimed among famous writers, musicologists, and Armenian traditional music lovers.

Norayr Mnatsakanyan was the first among Armenian traditional vocalists to introduce a new approach to traditional, as well as musical compilations of historic and contemporary gousans (minstrels). As an accepted convention of any national folklore, the works of Armenian traditional and gousan music were performed in a crude, rustic, and provincial fashion. Professional performers of the opera and classical music also tried to render these works. However, their efforts to perform these works alienated them altogether from the Armenian people, since the true significance of Armenian traditional music could not have been properly represented by the artificially elitist operatic genre. With his poetic approach to these great masterpieces of Armenian traditional and gousan music, Norayr Mnatsakanyan was the first vocalist to present them in a refined and natural fashion, granting them an unprecedented simplistic register of artistic sophistication. Unlike his predecessors, Mnatsakanyan attempted to convey these works with a deep sense of harmony and in a previously impregnable unison with the authors' characteristic mentality and sentiments reflected in their compilations.

At the same time, Norayr Mnatsakanyan meticulously pursued to eliminate the provincial character of the songs that had wandered among the Armenian people for centuries. Thus, Norayr Mnatsakanyan's performances are exceptional because they masterfully immerse into the poetic essence of the literary work and unify it with the melody of the song. Norayr Mnatsakanyan also performed songs by famous Armenian composers interwoven with lyrics by such famous Armenian poets, as Avetik Isahakian, Vahan Terian, Hovhannes Shiraz. Perhaps the greatest Armenian lyricist - Avetik Isahakian - highly valued Mnatsakanyan's contributions to the canon of Armenian performing arts and proclaimed Norayr "the velvet voice" of Armenia. Derenik Demirchian marvelled at Norayr's performances in wider poetic circles of the old Yerevan, calling Norayr Mnatsakanyan "a unique vocal interpreter of the popular consciousness, scattered bits of which are present in every Armenian individual." Being an art critic himself, Mnatsakanyan always conveyed great significance to the unity of the melody and the lyrics in whatever he performed.