National Center of Chamber Music

This guide to the National Center of Chamber Music in Yerevan follows how a Dutch baroque pipe organ, built by the Flentrop workshop for Bach-era music, ended up inside a 1977 concert hall in a Soviet Union with no official room for religion or Western imports. It traces the money and people who got it past Soviet customs by 1979 - an oil magnate's foundation, Catholicos Vazgen the First's backing, and organist Vahagn Stamboltsyan's persistence - and architect Stepan Kyurkchyan's decision to shape the hall like a three-nave Armenian basilica. By the 1990s, poor heating had left the instrument rotting and silent for years.