Family Time at Lakeside

One of the unique and special things about being part of a professional string quartet is the intimacy between the quartet members’ families. Getting to spend two weeks at Lakeside Chautauqua in Ohio gave all of our families a chance to visit. It was fun to have the kids, wives, and grandparents around while we rehearsed and performed because with all of our busy schedules, it’s often difficult for our families to find time to spend with one another. We also all enjoyed hearing our kids’ enthusiasm when they came to hear the orchestra rehearsals.

During the first week at Lakeside, both Jason’s and Gio’s families came to visit. As you can see, Gio’s daughter Helen enjoyed hanging out with the Beo guys while we rehearsed.

Gio’s daughter Helen watching Beo rehearse

Helen is a big fan of Jason’s violin playing!

Although we have a busy orchestra and quartet schedule, we make sure to spend time with our families while at Lakeside. One of the most peaceful hangout spots is on the pier at Lakeside, and, as you can see, our kids love it there as well. 🌊

Jason and his daughter Luna walking together on the pier

Jason's wife Jingyi and their daughter Luna and son Felix (in the stroller) relaxing with Sean on the pier

During the second week at Lakeside, Sean and Ryan’s family came to visit Lakeside. As you can see from the photos below, the kids and families alike had a blast hanging out at the lake and at the beach.

Sean's son Alistair excitedly enters Lake Erie for the first time, along with Sean's dad, Rick Neukom, and Gio

Ryan and his daughter Eleanor enjoying the beach at Lakeside together

Our kids would often come watch the Lakeside Symphony Orchestra (LSO) rehearsals, and would sometimes stay to enjoy running around Lakeside’s Hoover Auditorium.

Jason's wife Jingyi with their son Felix following an LSO rehearsal

Ryan and his daughter Eleanor having a sweet moment during a break from rehearsal

Sean's wife Becky with their son Alistair and Jason's daughter Luna enjoying Hoover Auditorium after an LSO rehearsal

Everyone in Beo and our families had a great time at Lakeside Chautauqua this year, and we’re looking forward to more adventures next summer!

131

Beethoven's Op. 131 is an astounding work, to say the least. It's full of depth, musical craft, and poetic nuance. Performing the work feels like going on an incredible journey (as does listening to it!). The making of our newest album, 131, also felt like a journey: navigating distance; searching for a sound; and Gio joining Beo!

The photo used for the cover of the album, created by Sean.

131 was the first recording project we embarked on in our new studio. While incredibly exciting, the challenge early on lived in the non-familiarity of the sound. It was a fantastic sound—clean, open but not too wet, balanced—but, every day in the space revealed yet another side of a seemingly infinite sonic personality. Every inch change in mic placement unveiled a new dimension of sound! We ultimately settled on a very close, intimate sound. I'm excited to explore this more with subsequent albums.

Time. Distance. Oof. Gio started playing with Beo during the fall of 2021—some concerts here and there. In January 2022 he officially joined. We started recording Beethoven's masterpiece on January 3! We had performed the work a handful of times throughout the fall—with Gio—but we used studio time to finesse our collective understanding and interpretation of the work. This is not typical, but was a really moving experience. Gio, at this point still living in Colorado, flew back to Pittsburgh in March to track Missy's wonderful work. And we recorded 19|20 during the last week of May (2022). The spacing of tracking, and the intervals apart in between, allowed for real reflection on what was being recorded. This reflection was valuable while editing the album.

Ludwig, Missy, and Sean rolled into one.

The blessing and curse of having our studio is that the amount of time, or takes, we allow ourselves is determined...by us... At the start of this project, none of us were unfamiliar with the process of recording. Typically, we would allow three, maybe four, passes of a movement or section and then move on. For this album we struck down this approach. We tracked as many takes as we could muster. These takes weren't arbitrary. And they weren't to “get it right”. (While editing I'd have ten—sometimes double that!—takes that all sounded great, pardon my lack of modesty.) Our approach was to use the available studio time to craft a very specific sound and interpretation. Painstakingly, sometimes. This process continued into the editing. Though sometimes making me crabby—sorry guys...—this process allowed the album to truly be a collective creation.

131 is the second classical concept album that we've released. In quartet rehearsal we try to fully understand and execute a musical idea before passing judgment on effectiveness. I think we're still in the “executing” phase of the classical concept albums. I'm not sure if they are effective. This is hard to gauge with only two albums. (maybe you disagree!?) I'm still enamored with the idea that an album can offer a specific journey only to be had by the collection of presented works on that album. Beethoven's Op. 131 is a journey unto itself. But hearing it following two other, carefully chosen works changes the context. It's this change of context that can break down the unwarranted boundaries of genre or era. It's this change of context that can connect us, today, with our ancestors. Maybe it can help tow the threads of humanity so often lost in digital and political consumption. We'll be in the studio all of April testing this once again. 

-Sean

Morgan Library & Museum

Hi! Jason here. By far one of my favorite concerts we’ve performed to date is at the incredible Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue in New York City this past Tuesday, January 31st. Let me tell you about it!

Our view of the Empire State Building just outside our place.

First of all, NYC is one of my favorite cities and it’s always fun being there. Being a true food lover, it’s always difficult to decide where to eat and when we’re there to perform it’s extra difficult because we often don’t have very much free time. Although we were able to eat at a few great places, the stand-out for me was a Chinese restaurant called Chili. We ordered probably 14 dishes and shared them family-style. Highly recommend!

Truffle beef tenderloin.

I don’t remember the name, but this was an amazing cocktail from Osamil.

Uni bibimbap from Korean restaurant Osamil.

Strawberry and olive oil cronut from Dominique Ansel.

Truffle beef tenderloin.

The library itself is a pretty impressive place but unfortunately because we were so busy preparing for the concert with sound checks, etc, that I wasn’t able to devote much time to looking around. I guess that just means another trip in the future!

We opened the program with Missy Mazzoli’s Enthusiasm Strategies, a piece that we have performed many times and happens to be an excellent program opener. Coincidentally, our album 131 was also released on 1/31, the day of this concert, and this piece of music also opens the album! Shameless solicitation: if you haven’t already, go check out the album!

Second on the program were five movements from Bach’s Art of Fugue, including the final, incomplete contrapunctus. Performing this profound work is already a meaningful event in its own right, but while we were performing I remember distinctly thinking about how in that very room was Bach’s last hand-written letter and it somehow felt very moving that we were there, 273 years after his death, performing his music for a live audience.

Bach’s last hand-written letter, on display at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Following the Bach, we performed one of Sean’s pieces, People. You can read about it on an earlier blog post here. Finishing the program was Shostakovich’s moving 8th quartet. We’ve performed the piece quite a few times this season and to me it never gets old! We got two published reviews of the concert, The New York Classical Review and The New York Concert Review were both very generous with their words.

Great trip, great venue, great food, great company, and a great concert. What more can you ask for?

California Tour

In January, Beo had a concert tour of both northern and southern California. My favorite part of the tour was performing multiple concerts. Now, before you say, “of course it was, that’s what a professional string quartet does!” Hear me out: as concerts begin to pick up again post-pandemic, one of the most satisfying parts of the job for me is getting to perform several concerts in a row in quick succession. From my experience, the best way I know of to play difficult repertoire convincingly and to leave a lasting impact with an audience is to perform a piece many times in less than ideal circumstances.

For example, my favorite performance venue of the tour was an art museum in Healdsburg, CA called The 222. We had an evening concert there, followed by only a couple of hours of sleep. We all then got up and drove an hour and a half to San Francisco Airport to catch our flight to LA. That same afternoon we had a concert in Fullerton, CA with a completely different program. While having to perform a concert after a flight on very little sleep is not easy, it’s this exact type of situation that helps us perform at a consistent high level and creates unity within the group.

In addition to performing for appreciative audiences, Beo had the opportunity to engage in several different types of educational outreach for a variety of ages of skill levels in both northern and southern California. To name a few, we performed for several schools in the Bay area, taught a masterclass in Pasadena, and ran an orchestra rehearsal for the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles. In-person school performances disappeared during the pandemic, so this was my first experience performing outreach as a member of Beo. My favorite aspect was how often I got to see skeptical kids become engaged and enthusiastic over the course of a program. Students who maybe thought they were going to have to watch 45 minutes of “boring classical music” were surprised by getting to interact and be a part of the performance.

When I travel to perform, I always make sure to meet up with good friends who live in the particular city I’m in. Of course, meeting up with friends means getting to try the local cuisine, and if you know anything about Beo, we had an absolute blast trying different restaurants in both San Francisco and LA. The variety of food we had was staggering—I don’t think I’ve been to so many different types of restaurants in such a short time span in my entire life! We’re planning another California tour for later this year or early 2024, and I’m already looking forward to performances while being extremely short on sleep, fun and engaging educational programs, and of course hanging with good friends while devouring an LA street taco.

-Gio

Festival Internacional de Música do Pará in Brazil

Gio here! Another international trip that Beo took this year was to Belém, Brazil. This is a particularly special place for me, because it is the hometown of my wife, Nathália Kato, who is a collaborative pianist. Beo was fortunate to get to perform piano quintets with Nathália at the Festival Internacional de Música do Pará (FIMUPA) in Belém. Belém is a beautiful city that sits nearly directly on the equator, and it’s sometimes referred to as the “Amazonia Manhattan.” While not rehearsing and performing, we enjoyed getting to try local exotic fruits and coffee, and taking a boat ride to an island in the Amazon.  

Beo and Nathália Kato with composer Luiz Pardal after their performance at the magnificent Igreja de Santo Alexandre

Our concert in Belém on November 8th was in a beautiful church – Igreja de Santo Alexandre. The program opened with Suíte Waldemar by local Belém composer Luiz Pardal, who arranged the piece for piano quintet for us. The piece is composed in three movements, and each movement is based on a different bird found in Brazil. Pardal is a well-known composer in Belém, and we had the opportunity to meet and play the piece for him before our performance. Following Suíte Waldemar, we performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet, which left the audience in stunned silence. After a brief pause, Nathália came back out to join us in Ernst von Dohnányi’s youthful and exciting Piano Quintet in C minor.

We had a great time talking to the audience after the concert, although Nathália was the only one of the five of us who speaks Portuguese, so we are thankful to her for translating all of our conversations, both after the concert, and throughout our Brazil trip.

-Gio

Açaí bowl and fried fish bites. A plethora of tropical fruits grow in Belém including Açaí, which locals pair with tapioca.

Members of Beo would often walk to a local coffee shop in Belém to have an afternoon coffee and get decent wifi while working

Caffeine!

Ryan enjoying a nice stroll.

Ibagué Festival 2022

Gio here. I wanted to write a special trip that Beo took this year. One of my favorite things about being a musician is getting to travel to interesting places to perform, oftentimes places that I would not have the opportunity to visit in any other context. In September, Beo got to travel to and perform in Ibagué, Colombia. We had a wonderful experience performing, giving masterclasses, and eating delicious, local food.

For the 2022 edition of the Ibagué Festival, they were looking for a quartet who was equally comfortable performing both new and standard repertoire, and Beo perfectly fits that criteria. We performed two programs while at the festival: the first on September 16th at Universidad del Tolima.

The second performance was on September 17th at the Conservatorio del Tolima. Highlights of the repertoire we chose for the programs show Beo’s diverse 2022-23 programming:

·      Sean Neukom (Beo violist)  – “People”

·      Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110

·      Beethoven – Op. 18, No. 1 in F major

·      Gabriela Ortiz – Mictlán from Altar de Muertos

The audiences in Ibagué were enthusiastic and welcoming, and they particularly connected with the pieces by Shostakovich and Ortiz. The dark and intense emotions of the Shostakovich had a powerful effect on the audience, and the wild and rhythmically intense Mictlán was a huge crowd pleaser.

In addition to performing, we also taught masterclasses to some of the promising students at the Conservatorio del Tolima.

Here are some other favorite memories from our trip.