Kaufman Music Center Presents Lembit Beecher and Karen Ouzounian: Mayrig at Kaufman Music Center

GRAMMY®-nominated Armenian-Canadian cellist and composer Karen Ouzounian and her husband Lembit Beecher give the New York premiere of Mayrig ("mother" in Armenian). This immersive and intimate 65-minute program, centered on the human voice, features cello, piano, electronics and vocals, along with projections of newly commissioned artwork by French illustrator Charles Berberian. The voices of Ouzounian’s mother and grandmother are interwoven with original arrangements of Armenian music from her family’s ancestral home of Anatolia, songs and stories from their post-genocide home of Lebanon, and the beloved music of Charles Aznavour. New compositions by Beecher, Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim, Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Ouzounian explore generational transmission, rootedness and uprootedness, with music teeming with passion and celebration, resilience and rage. Marin Marais’s Les Voix Humaines opens and closes the program, with music from hundreds of years ago providing a window into the present.

Program

Marin Marais — Les Voix Humaines Lembit Beecher — Kitchen Table Conversations; Music for the Passing of Days; Green Line Charles Aznavour — La Mamma Karen Ouzounian — Songs of the Sap Armenian songs arranged by Lembit Beecher and Karen Ouzounian Projections of original artwork by Charles Berberian

Compositions by Beecher, Ouzounian, Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh

Karen Ouzounian, cello, vocals, and co-creator

Lembit Beecher, piano, electronics, and co-creator