Music in Time of War projects a haunting sonic exhibition featuring the vocal and piano music of Armenian ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet and Claude Debussy, the music written at a time when both felt keenly the effects of war, respectively the Armenian genocide and World War One.

Together with fellow performers soprano Ruzan Mantashyan and pianists Katia Skanavi and Thomas Adès, that ever-imaginative pianist Russian-American Kirill Gerstein here explores the two composers’ intersecting experiences through Debussy’s late piano music and those compositions of Komitas’s which most powerfully evoke his people’s heartrending plight.

Why Gerstein should bring the music of Debussy and Komitas together in our own troubled times is easily answered. In his foreword to what is a very substantial book (not booklet) containing essays and other writings by French historian Annette Becker, Armenian musicologist Artur Avanesov, Columbia academic and author Khatchig Mouradian and composer and oboist Heinz Holliger, Gerstein notes that “As I write now, we are again surrounded by conflict and genocide… We see humanity’s worst and best in such times.”

Debussy was a...