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

Dvorák Cypresses Quartet (selections)
Beecher These Memories May Be True
Giddens At the Purchaser’s Option
Sibelius String Quartet in D Minor, “Voces Intimae”
Komitas Armenian Folk Songs (selections)

The Story
Songs and the echoes of home form the undercurrent of this program, beginning with a selection of Dvorák’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. Sibelius’s Voces Intimae (“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