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Creativity and innovation are at the heart of Rebekah Lesan’s music-making practice. Though classically trained as a Slovak-American cellist and composer, she strives to push the boundaries of classical music-making through improvisation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and blending genres. She has performed internationally in solo recitals and with chamber groups in countries including the United States, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and Ireland, and works with emerging composers to record and premier new works.

In her early days of playing cello in Bratislava, she was a prize winner at multiple national and international competitions for solo play, receiving first place at three national cello competitions (2013-14) and third place at the international Gustav Mahler cello competition (2019). Highlights of her chamber music experience include being selected for the honours string quartet of Five Seasons Chamber Music Festival in the U.S.A. both in 2015 and 2017, receiving third prize in a string quartet at the international competition Talents for Europe (2016), and winning the laureate in a trio at the international competition Julius von Beliczay (2019). During this time, she performed Slovak folk music and played an electric cello and sang in a rock band. She also began to develop her voice as a composer, premiering her first compositions for chamber music and solo piano.

A bachelor’s degree brought her to Scotland in 2019 to study under Robert Irvine. There, she performed with multiple chamber groups, including her current trio Atelier Ensemble. In 2021, Atelier Ensemble premiered a work written for them by a student composer at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen, and in March 2023, they delivered their programme ‘Slavic Voices’ in Glasgow, premiering Rebekah’s piece ‘Ancient One’. From 2020-2023, Rebekah was also a member of the boundary-pushing student ensemble, Studio Collective, led by violinist Daniel Pioro, with whom she had the opportunity to perform with Erland Cooper in the Norwich and Norfolk Festival (2022). In March 2023, they performed in the Southbank Centre alongside Pioro, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Liam Byrne.

In 2022, she workshopped a composer’s piece for cello and electronics, premiering it at the University of Glasgow’s Gleam Festival. That same year she recorded a set of six new works for cello and piano by Scottish composer Nigel Don and performed it in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.

Rebekah is currently in her Master’s degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, thanks scholarships from the Conservatoire and Help Musicians. She plays a cello made by Linus Andersson, purchased with the support of Wolfson Foundation and a runner-up award from Beatrice Huntington. Of her current projects, the biggest is the creation of her debut album of her own pieces for cello to be released in 2024. As both performer and composer, she is currently most excited about finding ambient and ethereal worlds of sound and exploring how folk and classical music combine and influence each other. In all her music-making, she strives to create beauty with authenticity to lift people out of the everyday and help them look higher.