By Movses Pogossian
YEREVAN — Playing music together as a family has been one of those blessings of life that my wife Varty and I feel very fortunate about. Seeing our children grow with a love of chamber music, fueled in large part by our summers at the Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival in New Hampshire, where both of us taught for many consecutive years, fills me with emotion. Aside from the obvious joy of experiencing the precious process of live music making and being touched by the grace of music geniuses of the past as well as working to give birth to newly written music compositions, there is an additional philosophical and deeply educational aspect that I feel strongly. Chamber music, in its core, is a truly democratic environment, without a division into “generals and soldiers,” where one has to be capable to lead and to follow, and where everyone in the group has its own equally unique and distinctive voice. Thinking in retrospect, this was an incredibly powerful and educational experience as my wife and I were, in fact, receiving free lessons on how to be the best parents we can, with the help of playing music together, and trying not to fall into the many traps of common inter-generational dissonances.
One of my happiest memories from 8 years ago is our first Music for Food concert at the Sunday Montrose Farmers Market, walking distance from our home in Glendale, CA. Through the efforts of our daughter Cara and her schoolmates, we got a booth space, put up a simple poster, placed an empty violin case on the street for cash donations, and proceeded to play music for about 4 hours, along with a good number of our family’s friends – a very diverse group of professionals from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood studios, current and former students, and our children’s middle school and high school friends. We kept swapping players and pieces, laughed a lot, but also made a few hundred dollars that were donated to the Food Bank in Burbank. For all of us, it was a simple yet effective lesson in giving and receiving, and also about stepping out of self-imposed boundaries and comfort zones. Since then, we have performed at a variety of venues and events, highlighting the ugly fact of an enormous food insecurity problem that, shockingly, exists in the richest country in the world. During the pandemic, while isolating at our home, we were lucky to be able to continue playing music together and produced a few charity video concerts from our living room, highlighting this important problem, and other causes that we care about (some of our past performances can be seen on our Youtube channel).
Preparing for an upcoming family concert in Armenia (and joined by our dear friend, an incredible composer and pianist Artur Avanesov), has an additional powerful and personal meaning. I was dreaming of coming back to perform in Armenia with the entire family for my parents and close friends for quite some time, and we were all set to do it in June of 2020, but the pandemic had other ideas, unfortunately. It took four more years of planning since then, since all five of us are now busy professionals, and it is a logistical challenge to find even a few days when everyone is available. But, finally, we have a date and a location: June 15 in the wonderfully renovated Babajanyan Concert Hall, which was formerly known as the “Small Hall of the Philharmonic,” and where I spent many evenings attending memorable concerts in my formative years growing up in Yerevan. We will be performing chamber music masterpieces by Haydn, Mozart, Schumann, as well as the Armenian premiere of Artur Avanesov’s Piano Trio. It also so happens that on the very next day my wife and I will be celebrating our 30th marriage anniversary (we got married in Yerevan in-between two rehearsals with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra).
It is not possible to ignore the pain of the recent events in Armenia, and the significant challenges that the society has to deal with on a daily basis. Therefore, it just makes sense to us as a family to use our upcoming concert to highlight a real and a very present problem. We have teamed up with a wonderful organization, Armenian Progressive Youth NGO (APY) to donate all of the proceeds from the concert towards their noble work of providing essential food and household items to displaced families from Artsakh, particularly those living in poverty with four or more children under 18 years old. We will also visit the APY headquarters for an outreach performance and meeting with the APY community.
