Composer and cellist to perform West Coast premiere of concert at Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music – Santa Cruz Sentinel

The married duo, consisting of composer Lembit Beecher (left) and cellist Karen Ouzounian, collaborated on the concerto “Tell Me Again,” a piece inspired by their backgrounds: they grew up in families that fled to other countries and found a home in North America. It will premiere on the U.S. West Coast at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music on August 3. (Contributed photo: Ebru Yildiz)

SANTA CRUZ — The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music kicks off on July 29, a two-week celebration of symphonic music featuring performances of compositions from around the world.

With the theme “Music as Movements,” this year’s program features a packed program of concerts, workshops, open rehearsals, and opportunities to meet musicians. There will also be West Coast or world premieres of numerous orchestral pieces, including a trumpet concerto by jazz legend Wynton Marsalis.

There’s a hefty program on August 3 in particular, featuring the West Coast premiere of Daniel Kellogg’s “The Golden Spike” and the world premieres of Nathaniel Heyder’s “Unbound: Phase 1” and Ivan Enrique Rodriguez’s “Casting the Dice,” both commissioned by the festival, as well as the West Coast premiere of a concerto written by a married couple that explores themes of family history, identity, cultural heritage, and shared generational experiences.

Known as “Tell Me Again,” the concerto was written by Santa Cruz-born composer Lembit Beecher for his wife, cellist Karen Ouzounian, and is based on their own family experiences. Beecher was born to an Estonian mother, and Ouzounian was born to an Armenian family that fled Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. She will perform the concerto at the festival.

Although Beecher participated in a conducting and composition workshop at the festival many years ago, “Tell Me Again” marks the first time one of his compositions has been performed on the main stage. He grew up in Bonny Doon and attended Bonny Doon Elementary School and the York School in Monterey.

Beecher’s love of music began in the Santa Cruz area. He learned to play the piano from Mary Jane Cope and from musician and teacher Gene Lewis.

“(Lewis) came to our house and filled in all the other musical gaps by teaching singing, guitar and jazz lessons, and I started writing and improvising a little bit,” Beecher said.

Beecher studied music at Harvard, but it was not until he received his master’s degree from Rice University in Houston that he began writing much more, receiving his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He served three terms as Music Alive composer-in-residence of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota, was the first composer-in-residence of Opera Philadelphia, and also worked as a visiting professor at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.

Ouzounian is a Toronto-based cellist who has performed worldwide, received the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award, and was a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet from 2012 to 2023, for which she was nominated for a Grammy.

Beecher and Ouzounian had worked together before, but “Tell Me Again” is their biggest project. It was commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and Beecher said it was the result of similar family experiences. His grandmother and mother fled Estonia in the final years of World War II and served five years in a refugee camp, and Ouzounian’s great-grandparents were expelled from Turkey during the Armenian Genocide, while her grandparents and parents fled Beirut for Canada during the Lebanese Civil War.

Beecher grew up in a family where he spoke English with his father and Estonian with his mother, only realizing later that his mother spoke English. He also had a secondhand understanding of Estonia, as he was unable to visit the country until Soviet rule ended when he was 10.

“A lot of my sense of identity was to some extent dependent on a sense of imagination of what Estonia was,” he said. “I started going there more often in the ’90s after independence, but there was always this sense of this faraway place that was home in many ways, but a place I didn’t really know much about, so there was a lot of imagination.”

Because Beecher and Ouzounian both come from families with a migrant background, they wanted to create a work of art that reflected this.

“I wanted to write a piece that thought about how these stories shaped the immigrant family experience and how they change a little bit over time, how each generation has to deal with these stories anew and find new meaning in them, whether they embrace them or reject them,” he said. “For each part of the concert, it’s kind of like a different generation.”

According to Beecher, the title emphasizes how people share family stories and how these are kept alive through repetition.

“The story takes on a life of its own, separate from the original events that inspired the story,” he said.

Collaborating with Ouzounian was a very special process for Beecher. He began writing the concerto in January 2020 and they worked very closely together during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I gave her some ideas and let her improvise on things and find our way into the piece through her cello technique and the kinds of things she was drawn to,” he said. “The player made it a more intimate and collaborative process than some of my pieces.”

The concerto premiered in 2021 with the Orlando Philharmonic, but the Cabrillo Festival concert will be its first public performance on the West Coast. Beecher hopes the piece will inspire audiences to find something similar in their own lives.

“I hope the storyline of the play suggests things within their family life and emotional life that are true,” he said.

“Tell Me Again” will be performed as part of the festival’s “Unbound” concert, which begins at 7 p.m. on Aug. 3 at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church St. The festival runs from July 28 to Aug. 11. For tickets and information, visit CabrilloMusic.org.