Aizuri Quartet

Performing an evening they’ve self-titled “Songs and Echoes of Home”, the award-winning all-female Aizuri string quartet makes their Emerald City Music debut.

THE TUNES

Dvorak: Cypresses Quartet (selections)
Beecher: These Memories May Be True
Britten: String Quartet no. 1
Sibelius: String Quartet in D Minor, “Voces lntimae”
Komitas: Armenian Folk Songs (selections)

THE STORY

Songs and the echoes of home form the undercurrent of this program, beginning with a selection of Dvorak’s love songs and concluding with folk songs by Komitas, whose music has become an enduring symbol of home deeply treasured by the Armenian diaspora. Britten’s String Quartet No. 1, composed in California in 1941, is a love letter to his native England, while Sibelius’s Voces lntimae (“Intimate Voices”) turns deeply inward, written during a period of psychological crisis and physical exile in his rural home “Ainola” (named after his wife Aino). California native Lembit Beecher’s These Memories May Be True was inspired by the fragments of Estonian culture – the songs and stories passed down to him by his grandmother, Taimi Lepasaar. Beecher writes: “This piece is a little like the scattered image of Estonia that I had while growing up, filtered through many layers of retelling, and touched by a sense of nostalgia, a sense of something beautiful that has been lost in the wash of time.”

THE ARTISTS

The Aizuri Quartet: Emma Frucht, violin | Miho Seagusa, violin | Ayane Kozasa, viola | Karen Ouzounian, cello

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