The Old Steeple and Eureka Chamber Music Series enter into a first-time collaboration, bringing the 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant winning Balourdet Quartet to Ferndale for an immersive presentation combining live music and a panel discussion about freedom, history, and the role of art in society.

In our increasingly fractured and polarized society, the arts are one of the few activities that can help to bridge the divide and bring us together. Music has an uncanny way of celebrating our differences while illuminating our common humanity. The Balourdet Quartet and ECMS artistic director Tom Stone will present musical selections and a discussion of music in the context of the historical events that inspire and shape it.

The centerpiece of the evening will be a performance of the groundbreaking and Grammy Award winning “Different Trains” by American composer Steve Reich, which combines live musical performance with pre-recorded sound, inspired by two very different sorts of World War II era train trips, one in America and and one in Europe during the holocaust.

Also included will be works by Erwin Schulhoff, the great Austro-Czech composer whose life was cut short at the Würzburg concentration camp in 1942. Schulhoff's extraordinary, jazz infused compositions were nearly lost after being deemed "degenerate" by the Nazis, too "Western" by the USSR, and too radical in America, where his socialist and communist sympathies were unpalatable.

Tom Stone, himself a violinist who was a founding member of the Cypress String Quartet, will join the Balourdet Quartet playing the viola, performing music for string quintet by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who was the grandson of the influential Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and in his relatively short life composed some of the most beloved music of the early Romantic era. 

By building the bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras, perhaps no composer plumbed the depths of human emotion more profoundly than Ludwig van Beethoven. His final string quartet was also his last major composition and it poses the eternal question, "Must it be?," the phrase he wrote on the manuscript of his dark and intense third movement. Beethoven's masterful work provides a fitting conclusion to the program, as his mysterious riddle takes on fresh meaning in modern times.

Please join us for a lively performance and discussion.