Among the dozens of events on this year’s Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, Lembit Beecher’s “Tell Me Again” promises a special performance.
It’s a cello concerto Beecher wrote for his wife, cellist Karen Ouzounian, who joins the orchestra in the work’s West Coast premiere, led by the festival’s Grammy Award-winning Music Director and Conductor, Cristian Măcelaru.
Inspired by Beecher and Ouzounian’s Armenian, Lebanese, and Estonian roots, Beecher says it’s a piece drawn from family histories. It makes its West Coast premiere Aug. 3, on a program titled “Unbound” that also includes works by Daniel Kellogg, Nathaniel Heyder, and Iván Enrique Rodríguez.
“It’s a piece I wrote thinking about Karen and our families, our experiences growing up,” Beecher explained in a recent phone call. “I wanted to write a piece about the immigrant experience but the way stories of migration change in time, acquire new meanings, and get re-invented for a new generation.”
Beecher, who spent his youth near Santa Cruz, said his parents still live in the area, while he and his wife, who now reside in New York, “shared a similar experience of growing up, speaking different languages with parents and grandparents, and having stories central to our identity.”
Composed for cello and orchestra, “Tell Me Again” begins with “scattered bursts of energy, sort of like the chaos of the world,” he said. “Gradually, the cello acquires a voice of its own, finding a path, telling a story in a way of claiming ownership of the events that have happened to us.”
The second movement draws on Estonian folk songs; “the cello,” he said, “becomes a sort of singer, teaching the songs to the orchestra. It’s a kind of call and response, maybe a second-generation look back.”
A cadenza for cello introduces the third movement, “quite rhythmic and fast,” he said, “like a general, trying to push ahead and not look back too much. There’s melancholy and contemplation, forward and backward looking,” as the work comes to an end.
“Tell Me Again” was premiered, in the early years of the pandemic, at the Orlando Philharmonic. It had to be outdoors, notes Beecher. “This,” he said, “will be the first indoor performance.”
As a child, Beecher was keenly aware of displacement: his parents were immigrants, and although he grew up in and around Santa Cruz, many of the stories they told expressed loss.
“I think so much of making art is a struggle against loneliness, for connection, and for understanding,” he said. “The way we’ve gotten to where we are today isn’t just about looking back, but looking forward and trying to understand who we are in this moment and where we want to be going forward.
“It’s so much of the way we live our lives, whether you grew up in an immigrant experience like ours, or much more grounded in a place.”
Yet Beecher says there were wonderful experiences in his childhood, like when Arvo Pärt came to Santa Cruz for Cabrillo. The great Estonian composer visited Beecher’s family at their home.
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“He was an incredible figure, one of the first Estonians who had an identity as a composer outside of Estonia,” Beecher said. “A real cultural figure — Michael Stipe quoted him on one of his albums!”
That international spirit of inclusion suffuses the Cabrillo Festival, with musicians coming to Santa Cruz each year from all over the world; a long list of additional guests this season include Karim Al-Zand, Clarice Assad, Pierre Jalbert, and Leila Josefowicz.
“I don’t know anything like it,” says Beecher. “To have an orchestral festival focused on new music is such a rare thing. The atmosphere and the generosity of the musicians is what really stands out. I feel it whenever I come here.”
Contact Georgia Rowe at [email protected].
CABRILLO FESTIVAL
Through: Aug. 11
Where: Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, and additional Santa Cruz locations
Tickets: Individual passes, $30-$82, festival passes, $295-$360; some events free; 831-420-5260; cabrillomusic.org.
Unbound program: 7 p.m. Saturday at Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, $20-$82
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