Karen Ouzounian to Perform Lembit Beecher's 'Tell Me Again' At Cabrillo Festival Of Contemporary Music

On Saturday, August 3, 2024 at 7:00pm, Music Director Cristian Măcelaru will lead the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Orchestra in the West Coast premiere of composer Lembit Beecher's cello concerto Tell Me Again, featuring cellist, vocalist and composer Karen Ouzounian, as well as new works by composers Daniel Kellogg, Nathaniel Heyder, and Iván Enrique Rodríguez.

Lembit Beecher's Tell Me Again delves into narratives of immigration and heritage, composed during the pandemic for his wife, virtuosic cellist Karen Ouzounian, whose Armenian family immigrated from Beirut to Canada during the Lebanese Civil War. Beecher's Estonian grandmother and mother fled to the U.S. during the later stages of World War II, spending a period of years in displaced persons camps. Beecher composed this concerto, premiered with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Eric Jacobsen in April 2021, with the cello centered as the embodiment of these deeply personal stories and familial histories.

Beecher shares, "Both Karen and I grew up with stories of family origin and migration. My grandmother was Estonian: she escaped during the latter part of World War II, eventually immigrating, along with my seven-year-old mother, to the United States after five years in displaced persons camps. Karen's grandmother was Armenian: she grew up in Beirut, her own parents having been driven out of Anatolia (present-day Turkey) during the Armenian Genocide, and Karen's parents and grandmother immigrated to Canada during the Lebanese Civil War.

"As I wrote, I thought about the importance of these stories to our respective families. I think that for all of us, but particularly those who have lived through upheaval and trauma, telling a story is not just a way to convey a sequence of events but a way to process experience, to try to come to terms with and have some degree of power over the forces that have shaped our lives. With Tell Me Again, I wanted to write music that reflected the way in which stories like these become a central part of the culture of families and communities as they are told over and over again-even as they change over time-with each new generation consciously or unconsciously making choices about what to omit and what to emphasize."

Speaking Estonian with his mother and English with his father, Beecher grew up in Santa Cruz under the redwoods of the California Central Coast, a few miles from the Pacific. A childhood filled with family stories of homeland, migration and displacement led to an interest in documentary, and beginning with his 2009 documentary oratorio And Then I Remember, he has created numerous works incorporating interviews and personal testimonies into his music, both as recorded audio and as sung text.

"It is particularly special to play this piece that emerged out of years of deep collaboration with Lembit," Ouzounian comments. "The voice of the cello in the piece is intimately connected to my family history, my approach to the instrument, and my own personal journey: drawing a dramatic arc that is energized, empowered, and poignant. The relationship between the cello and orchestra is so vibrantly crafted by Lembit: fresh music in which hints of Armenian and Estonian music float by in the breeze."

As part of the creative process, Beecher created his own stop-motion animation, made with plastalina modeling clay, toothpicks, pencil and paper, and filmed at the Copland House in Cortlandt, NY.

Program Information

UNBOUND
Saturday, August 3, 2024 at 7:00pm
Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium | Santa Cruz, CA
Link: https://cabrillomusic.org/2024-season/unbound-2/

Daniel Kellogg - The Golden Spike [West Coast Premiere]
Nathaniel Heyder - unbound: Phase 1 [World Premiere | Festival Commission]
Lembit Beecher - Tell Me Again [West Coast Premiere]
Part I: In Which a Story Emerges
Part II: A Song Sung with Others
Part III: In Motion
Karen Ouzounian, cello
Iván Enrique Rodríguez - Casting the Dice [World Premiere | Festival Commission]

Cabrillo Festival Orchestra
Cristian Măcelaru, conductor

About Lembit Beecher

Estonian-American composer and animator Lembit Beecher writes "hauntingly lovely and deeply personal" music (San Francisco Chronicle) that stems from a fascination with the ways memories, histories and stories permeate our contemporary lives. Threading together fragments of family lore, distantly experienced legends, imagery and songs from Estonian folk culture,along with explorations of place, migration, natural processes and ecology, he has created an idiosyncratic and thoughtful musical language full of fragile lyricism, propulsive energy, and visceral emotions, which draws raves for its "astonishing musical invention" (Philadelphia Inquirer) and "exquisite touches" (San Francisco Chronicle).

From song cycles like After the Fires, based on conversations with residents of his home town of Bonny Doon about the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires, to large-scale pieces like Say Home, a 38-minute work for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra that weaves through its musical texture the voices of almost 50 residents of the Twin Cities speaking about the meaning of home, Lembit's works are grounded in a sense of empathy, exploring the relationship between individual experience and communal understanding.

Noted for his collaborative spirit and "ingenious" interdisciplinary projects (The Wall Street Journal), Lembit has served three-year terms as the Music Alive composer-in-residence of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the inaugural composer-in-residence of Opera Philadelphia, working with devised theater actors, poets, ethnographers and engineers, as well as incorporating Baroque instruments, electronically-controlled sound sculptures, homemade speaker systems and stop-motion animation into his projects. Lembit's three operas with noted Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch have drawn particular acclaim. Starring Frederica von Stade and Marietta Simpson and directed by Joanna Settle, his opera Sky on Swings, which traces the relationship of two women diagnosed with Alzheimer's, was praised as "a shattering musical and theatrical evocation of what it feels like to have Alzheimer's disease" (The Wall Street Journal). In 2015 he received a major grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to develop and produce Sophia's Forest, a chamber opera for soprano Kiera Duffy, the Aizuri Quartet, and a multi-piece sound sculpture, built in collaboration with architects and engineers at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University's ExCITe Center.

Recent premieres include Tell Me Again for cellist Karen Ouzounian and the Orlando Philharmonic, A Year to the Day, a song cycle with librettist Mark Campbell, written for tenor Nicholas Phan and violinist Augustin Hadelich, and string quartets for the Juilliard, Aizuri and Lydian quartets, in addition to works for cellist Seth Parker Woods, bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. The Grand Prize Winner of the S&R Foundation's Washington Award, Lembit was a graduate fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Denison University, and has been in residence at the Copland House, MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, White Mountains Festival, Scrag Mountain Music, and the Decoda Skidmore Chamber Music Institute. Lembit has lived in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Berlin, New York and Philadelphia, earning degrees from Harvard, Rice and the University of Michigan where his primary teachers included Evan Chambers, Bright Sheng, Karim Al-Zand, Pierre Jalbert, Kurt Stallmann and Bernard Rands. Also active as a pianist and animator, Lembit has created stop-motion animations for the Experiential Orchestra, Aizuri Quartet, Decoda, Music on the Strait and violinist/composer Michelle Ross. For 2023-24, Lembit served as a Visiting Artist-Teacher at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford. He lives in Washington Heights, New York with his wife, cellist and composer Karen Ouzounian. Learn more at lembitbeecher.com.

About Karen Ouzounian

Cellist Karen Ouzounian creates music from a deeply personal place. An acclaimed soloist, chamber musician, collaborator and composer, she is the recipient of the S&R Foundation's Washington Award and sought after for her open-hearted, vibrantly detailed and fiercely committed performances. Recent projects include the creation of an experimental theater work with director Joanna Settle; the world premiere of Lembit Beecher's cello concerto Tell Me Again with the Orlando Philharmonic; the world premiere of Anna Clyne's Shorthand for solo cello and strings with The Knights, which she toured as soloist with The Knights throughout Europe and the U.S. and released on Avie Records; the release of Kayhan Kalhor's Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur for solo cello, kamancheh and tabla; the development, touring and recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Falling Out of Time; and the digital world premiere of Beecher's A Year to the Day, filmed for The Violin Channel with Augustin Hadelich and Nicholas Phan. Additional recent and upcoming appearances include concertos with the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Virginia Symphony, Sarasota Festival Orchestra, Greater Bridgeport Symphony, and Philharmonic Orchestra of Santiago, Chile, in repertoire ranging from the Elgar Cello Concerto to John Adams' Absolute Jest.

Dedicated to the art of chamber music, she was a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet for eleven years, during which time the ensemble was awarded major chamber music prizes on three continents and earned a GRAMMY nomination. She has toured with Musicians from Marlboro, appeared at the Ravinia, Caramoor and Ojai festivals, and performs regularly as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble and The Knights. Her evening-length video work In Motion, an exploration of heritage, family history and migration through interviews, her own compositions, and collaborations with visual artists Kevork Mourad and Nomi Sasaki and composer-percussionist Haruka Fujii, was presented by BroadBand. Recent compositions include works for the Silkroad Ensemble, Noe Music, and an upcoming work for solo cello, Armenian instruments and choir for Cantori New York. 

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

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