Musicatlas
Concert date: 3 June 2007 (Sunday)
Venue: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, USA
Eve Beglarian collaborates with La Master Choral on work to premiere June 3, 2007
The Los Angeles Master Chorale closes its 43rd season on Sunday, June 3, 2007, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the first pan-cultural installment of “LA is the World,” which features a collaboration among Eve Beglarian, an American composer of Armenian decent, Iranian-American musicians Pejman Hadadi and Manoochehr Sadeghi, and the Chorale. Also on the program are James MacMillan’s visceral Cantos Sagrados (Sacred Songs), featuring noted organist David Goode, who made his first appearance with the Chorale in 2004, and Arvo Pärt’ timeless Te Deum, whose antiphonal choirs make it the consummate “surround-sing” piece to showoff Disney Hall’s exacting acoustics. A repeat performance on June 7, 2007, is slated to be the keynote performance for the prestigious Chorus America Conference, which the Chorale is hosting in Los Angeles from June 6 to 9, 2007.
Explaining the personal impetus for her work, Beglarian says, “While I have collaborated with traditional musicians on several projects over the last ten years, I only recently have begun to work with the music of my own heritage and background. My father grew up as a member of the Armenian diaspora in Teheran, educated at Zoroastrian schools, and I feel a deep but as yet not fully explored kinship with the music and culture of Armenia and Iran. Until the last months of his life, my father did not talk much about his childhood and youth; he did not teach us the languages or the recipes of his childhood; he had always seemed to fully embrace American life without ever looking back. But his stories and reminiscences in those last months charge me to study and embrace Armenian and Persian culture. My most recently completed major piece, I am writing to you from a far-off country, is my first substantial exploration of Middle-Eastern culture; the next will be a production of The Libation Bearers in Greece, with a chorus of Persian female singers; directly after that, I will be embarking on this new piece for the LA Master Chorale.”
Beglarian is a composer with a history of working with traditional artists from around the world. Prior collaborations in non-Western traditions include Forgiveness (1998-2000), a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Akira Matsui that premiered at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis; music for The Bacchae (1996), for male chorus and Chinese instrumental ensemble commissioned by The New York Greek Drama Company and premiered at the Chinese National Beijing-Opera Theater in Beijing; and participation as a Fellow in the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange at UCLA (1996 and 1997). Currently, Beglarian is working on music for a production of “Libation Bearers” with director Lee Breuer and Los Angeles-based Persian singer Mamak Khadem, which will premiere at the 2006 Patmos Festival in Greece.
For more information, please call (800) 787-5262 or visit www.lamc.org