By Wynne Delacoma
American cellist Karen Ouzounian’s professional résumé has one unexpected entry.
Most of her achievements fall in the category of a gifted, classically trained musician forging a strong, creative career: Graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School. A founding member of the Aizuri Quartet, which has held residencies at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Caramoor Festival, and the Curtis Institute, and recently won the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award for the 2022–24 seasons. Memberships in Yo-Yo Ma’s boundary-breaking Silkroad Ensemble as well as The Knights, the innovative New York City–based chamber orchestra. On September 13 at Ravinia, she will be the soloist with The Knights in the Chicago premiere of Shorthand, a new work for cello and chamber ensemble commissioned from Anna Clyne, a former composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. [Ed.: Since this article was originally published, the Aizuri Quartet has been announced as a featured artist on Ravinia’s fall/spring concert series, on December 10.]
The outlier on Ouzounian’s résumé? The Aizuri Quartet’s five-night gig this past April as the opening act for Wilco, the fabled Chicago alt-rock band fronted by Jeff Tweedy. Wilco was touring to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of its mega-hit debut album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
“That came about in a really cool way,” Ouzounian said with a laugh. “In February of 2021 during lockdown we got together with Nels Cline, the Wilco guitarist. He’s an incredibly versatile musician who plays a lot of experimental music and new music in addition to playing with Wilco.”
Composer Douglas Cuomo enlisted Cline and the Aizuri to play one of his new works, Seven Limbs.
“We loved working with Nels so much,” said Ouzounian. “He is the consummate chamber musician. He did this incredibly powerful, improvised playing for Doug’s piece. He was a joy to work with. Then he asked if we would be interested in opening for Wilco on its 20th anniversary tour for the album. We were able to do it for five concerts in New York.” So after chamber concerts in Texas, New York, and the Eastman School of Music in March, the Aizuri Quartet took the stage April 15–20 at the United Palace, a lavishly restored vintage movie house in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
During their week of performances with Wilco in New York, Karen Ouzounian and the Aizuri Quartet also appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with the band to play “Poor Places” from their seminal album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
“The band was so nice to us,” said Ouzounian. “The general vibe was so open and kind. We got to play our music for about 25 minutes in the opening set, and the audience seemed to absolutely love it. And then we just transitioned immediately into the Wilco show after that. It was awesome.”
For the Aizuri, “our music” can be anything from works by the medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen and J.S. Bach to newly written pieces by a dizzyingly wide range of emerging and more established composers. Their Wilco set included a string quartet arrangement of the bluegrass gospel tune “Working on a Building,” and the third movement of Lift by Paul Wiancko. At times lyrically brooding, at times gleefully manic and off-kilter, Lift was featured on Blueprinting, the Aizuri’s Grammy-nominated debut album.
During their Ravinia Steans Music Institute fellowships, Ouzounian (above right), violinist Miho Saegusa (below left), and violist Ayane Kozasa (below right) focused on growth as chamber musicians, working with faculty like former New England Conservatory president Laurence Lesser (above left) and the program’s longtime director, violinist Miriam Fried, on solo and small-ensemble works.
The Aizuri Quartet grew out of Ouzounian’s two summers as a fellow at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, in 2010 and 2011: “After the second summer at Ravinia, two other fellows [violinist Miho Saegusa and violist Ayane Kozasa] and I started talking about perhaps starting a string quartet. Chamber music was such a home, such a passion for the three of us. It was interesting to start pointing our compasses in one direction and learn by doing. We didn’t know what we were embarking on, but from the start, we were really serious about it.”
Returning to the Steans Institute in 2014 as the Aizuri Quartet was an important step in the group’s development.
“Miriam Fried [director of the institute’s Program for Piano & Strings] was a hugely influential mentor to all of us individually, personally and as a group,” said Ouzounian. “Her belief in the group was huge for our development at that time. The seriousness of the study at Ravinia is so inspiring, the coaching we had that summer, all the rehearsal time we had, living together.”
“It’s important for us not to have people assume that we would play a certain type of repertoire or in a certain way. As a quartet we can play Beethoven but also rhythmic, groove-based new music in a very powerful way.”
But the quartet’s musical profile did not emerge overnight.
“Our identity sort of evolved in its own way,” said Ouzounian. “Over time we realized our string quartet really loves experimentation and being versatile and playing a vast range of styles. We love playing Beethoven, absolutely. But we also started having pieces written for us and playing newer music.
“We were invited to be the quartet in residence at the Met Museum in the 2017–18 season, and we started developing our own approach to programming, juxtaposing a lot of different music and having music arranged for string quartet that wasn’t originally written for it. We invited collaborators—poets, composers, a Japanese shakuhachi player—really developing these creative programs, approaching a theme from as many angles as we could. That was an important moment for the quartet. It’s something we’ve continued to embrace, to really challenge ourselves on the programming side.”
The first concert of the Met series typified the Aizuri’s approach. Titled Music and Mayhem, it featured pieces by composers confronting war and societal collapse—a quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina written as the Soviet Union crumbled; Steve Reich’s Different Trains, a meditation on World War II for quartet and pre-recorded tape; and Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet from 1809, composed as Napoleon marched toward Vienna.
The Knights’ September 13 program in Ravinia’s Martin Theatre is similarly inventive. Titled The Kreutzer Project, it takes a wide-ranging look at one of Beethoven’s most famous works: the impassioned Violin Sonata No. 9 (nicknamed “Kreutzer” for its dedicatee) for violin and piano, composed in 1803. The sonata directly inspired at least two other notable works of art: Tolstoy’s 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata, a roiling tale of lust, insanity, jealousy, and obsession, and Leoš Janáček’s intense, driven String Quartet No. 1 (Kreutzer Sonata), composed in 1923. The Knights asked two contemporary composers—Anna Clyne and Colin Jacobsen (their co-director)—to look at Beethoven’s sonata, Tolstoy’s novella and Janáček’s string quartet and write new pieces in response. In addition to Jacobsen’s Kreutzings and Clyne’s Shorthand, the concert will include chamber orchestra arrangements of Beethoven’s sonata, Janáček’s quartet, and a collection of Moravian/Slovakian folk songs.
“The idea of time travel is at the heart of The Kreutzer Project,” said Ouzounian, referring to the sonata’s influence decades, even centuries after Beethoven wrote it. “Anna was inspired by a line from Tolstoy’s novella: ‘Music is the shorthand of emotion.’ Her piece draws on two themes, one from the Beethoven sonata, the other from the Janáček quartet. She uses that material as the DNA of the piece. The cello doesn’t get to take a beat of rest. It’s incredibly passionate and gorgeous.”
Clyne wrote two versions of Shorthand, one for cello and string quintet and one for cello and string orchestra. When Ouzounian and The Knights prepared for the world premiere of the string orchestra version in July 2020 at the Caramoor Festival, the music carried even more emotional meaning.
“It was the first thing I played since the pandemic lockdown began [in March 2020],” she said. “We really didn’t know if it would go forward; everyone was scared at that time. We got together in Long Island to rehearse outdoors. We were far apart and outside in the blistering heat. Then we went to Caramoor to perform it as part of a livestream. There was no audience. And we recorded it right before the premiere that day.
“It was an incredibly emotional and unusual experience,” said Ouzounian. “I remember the feeling of being with my friends, The Knights. I had missed my friends so much, and I felt so much love and support from them at that place and time in the world. I felt like our playing was more powerful—vulnerable and powerful, together.”
She’s looking forward playing the piece for a live audience at Ravinia and perhaps eventually on a tour with The Knights.
Meanwhile, thanks to the Cleveland Quartet Award, the Aizuri’s performance calendar will be expanding, [such as to Carnegie Hall in October, in addition to the newly announced return to Ravinia on December 10]. Which means the four members will continue to think about new approaches to programming.
Ouzounian appeared at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Hall in early 2020 with the Aizuri Quartet, one of their first concerts with violinist Emma Frucht in the chair of former members Zoë Martin-Doike (2012–16) and Ariana Kim (2016–19).
“It’s important for us not to be pigeonholed,” Ouzounian said, “or for people to assume that we would play a certain type of repertoire or play in a certain way. I think as a quartet we can play Beethoven in a very powerful way and also play very complex, rhythmic, sort of groove-based new music in a very powerful way.
“We talk about the quartet being a living art,” she said. “One of our values is curiosity. Hopefully, our programs inspire curiosity in audience members who might not otherwise have drawn a connection between Hildegard von Bingen and Beethoven and Conlon Nancarrow. It’s about creating a home for curiosity and exploration, both for us and for listeners.” ●
Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006 and has been an adjunct journalism faculty member at Northwestern University. She is a freelance music critic, writer, and lecturer.