Lembit Beecher

Estonian-American composer and animator Lembit Beecher writes “hauntingly lovely and deeply personal” music (San Francisco Chronicle) that stems from a fascination with the way memories, histories, and stories permeate our contemporary lives. Threading together fragments of family lore, distantly experienced legends, imagery, and songs from Estonian folk culture, and explorations of place, migration, natural processes, and ecology, he has created an idiosyncratic and thoughtful musical language full of fragile lyricism, propulsive energy, and visceral emotions, which draws raves for its “astonishing musical invention” (Philadelphia Inquirer) and “exquisite touches” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Speaking Estonian with his mother and English with his father, Lembit grew up under the redwoods of the California Central Coast, a few miles from the wild Pacific. A childhood filled with family stories of homeland, migration, and displacement led to an interest in documentary, and beginning with his 2009 documentary oratorio “And Then I Remember,” Lembit has created numerous works incorporating interviews and personal testimonies into his music, both as recorded audio and as sung text. From song cycles like “After the Fires,” based on conversations with residents of his home town of Bonny Doon about the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires, to large-scale pieces like “Say Home,” a 38-minute work for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra that weaves through the musical texture the voices of almost 50 residents of the Twin Cities speaking about the meaning of home, Lembit’s works are grounded in a sense of empathy, exploring the relationship between individual experience and communal understanding.

Noted for his inquisitive, collaborative spirit and “ingenious” interdisciplinary projects (Wall Street Journal), Lembit has served three-year terms as the Music Alive composer-in-residence of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the inaugural composer-in-residence of Opera Philadelphia, working with devised theater actors, poets, ethnographers, and engineers, as well as incorporating baroque instruments, electronically-controlled sound sculptures, homemade speaker systems, and stop-motion animation into his projects. Lembit’s three operas with noted Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch have drawn particular acclaim. Starring Frederica von Stade and Marietta Simpson and directed by Joanna Settle, his opera “Sky on Swings,” which traced the relationship of two women diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, was praised as “a monumental achievement” (Parterre), “theatrically true and artistically distinguished” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and “a shattering musical and theatrical evocation of what it feels like to have Alzheimer’s disease” (Wall Street Journal). In 2015 he received a major grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to develop and produce “Sophia’s Forest,” a chamber opera for soprano Kiera Duffy, the Aizuri Quartet, and a multi-piece sound sculpture, built in collaboration with architects and engineers at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University’s ExCITe Center.