Beo String Quartet is thrilled to join fantastic colleagues on the roster at Lisa Sapinkopf Artists beginning with the 2022-2023 season. LSA represents artists of the highest caliber, several of whom Beo String Quartet has known personally and admired for many years. Check out our calendar for 2023 tour details!
Andrew Giordano joins Beo as new violinist
Andrew Giordano previously won prizes at the Fischoff, Coltman, Plowman, and Alice & Eleonore Schoenfeld competitions as a member of the Colorado-based Altius Quartet, with whom he performed for nine years before the ensemble disbanded in 2021.
Founded in 2015, Beo String Quartet has given over 45 world premieres and toured extensively performing classical, contemporary, and original works featuring sound and video technology. Beo welcomes Andrew Giordano for performances as guest artists of the Zemlinsky Prize, featuring performances of music by Carl Vine, Missy Mazzoli, and Colin Matthews at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music throughout the 2021-2023 season. Beo's original works range from classically-inspired pieces like Haydn Recycled to progressive rock-inspired and socially conscious works Ghosts Revisited and 19-20 which incorporate sound manipulation and theatrical staging into the performance.
As recording artists, Beo has recorded works by Max Duykers, Gary Eskow, Andrew List, Kerrith Livengood, Alejandro Rutty, and Kyle Sanna. Upcoming collaborations include an album of works by Charles Nichols for Centaur Records and a premiere recording of works by Missy Mazzoli available from their own label, NeuKraft Records.
Welcome to the family, Gio!
Ghosts Revisited album release
October 21st, 2021 — Beo String Quartet is excited to announce Ghosts Revisited, a chamber-alt album distributed by NeuKraft Records. Ghosts Revisited, performed by string quartet, guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, is Beo String Quartet's new take on personal transformation.
"We all change as we have different life experiences," says producer Sean Neukom. "Ghosts Revisited is about experiences that are intense--the things that cause someone to basically break out of their old skin. The heavier sound world of progressive rock helps us to access this intensity." The highly poetic, fragmentary lyrics take listeners right to the edge of consciousness, telling a story that is more felt than understood.
Classical listeners will hear the string quartet running through the core of Ghosts Revisited. The album opens with an expansive and virtuosic introduction for string quartet before launching the band into the first song. The string quartet is also there to seamlessly transition the mood between each song played by the full band.
Distortion, overdubbing, compression, and room/delay effects help the strings to blend with their rock counterparts and create a clear texture. "We've flipped the roles of string quartet vs rock combo normally found in popular styles," says producer Sean Neukom. "In Ghosts Revisited, it's the strings giving us the substance of the sound. The drums, guitar, bass, and vocals drop in for added definition and texture."
Check out the album on your favorite streaming service and be prepared to hear something the likes of which you’ve never heard before.
NeuKraft Records debut album
Beo String Quartet announces Heart sleeve Triptych, the debut classical concept album for its in-house label, NeuKraft Records. Founded in 2015, "the Beo Quartet...[has] mastered the delicate and refined art of quartet playing. This is an ensemble whose music making speaks to the heart as well as the mind, and they deserve every opportunity to be heard, appreciated and embraced.” -Richard Danielpour, Grammy-nominated composer
Works by Kyle Sanna (Sequence for Minor White), Kerrith Livengood (This is my Scary Robot Voice), and Felix Mendelssohn (Quartet in a minor) join together in Heart sleeve Triptych for an intensely psychological listening experience. "What holds this album together is that each piece is fueled by powerful experiences from the composers' innermost selves," says cellist Ryan Ash, "but they're from totally different sound worlds. Kyle gives us really warm, smooth and satisfying textures, but Kerrith goes for mysterious, jagged, and unsettling. Felix is very traditional but no less passionate."
NeuKraft Records producer Sean Neukom tailors his engineering approach to maximize the expressive potential of each piece: "With Sequence for Minor White, the question was how do we tell the story of the piece through sound? Kyle is an electric guitarist and has done a lot of work in mainstream styles. He's already given us a bunch of neat-sounding extended techniques, like blowing into the instruments to simulate wind, so it makes sense to use distortion, overdubbing, over-compression, and room/delay effects in the recording. We play with space, direction and dimension too. These things aren't usually found on a classical album."
The works by Kerrith and Felix get a different acoustic treatment. "I'm the engineer and producer for this album, but I'm also a member of the quartet," says Neukom. "This puts me in a unique position where I can work for a NeuKraft Records signature sound that is very close to what I hear when I'm actually performing in the group."
Refusing to be confined by genre, Beo String Quartet appears on concert stages across the nation bringing classical masterpieces, contemporary works, and original progressive rock to its audiences. Highlights from the planned 2020-2021 season included performances of John Adams' Absolute Jest with the Dayton Philharmonic and the premiere of triggerLand, an amplified, rhythmically-charged rock show tackling gun culture in America. Beo String Quartet can be heard on its new show An Inside Look, where Beo pulls back the curtain for viewers on the challenges and rewards of its current and favorite repertoire. Each Heart sleeve Triptych work has its own An Inside Look episode available on YouTube.
Enter NeuKraft Records
Beo has officially started its own recording label, NeuKraft Records, for the purpose of allowing maximum freedom in regard to the types of albums the quartet is able to release. Music labels typically prefer a group to stick to straightforward musical categories, which can often impede on that group’s creativity and exploration. As Beo often has difficulty “coloring inside the lines” and we already have all of the technology and equipment (including our own recording studio) necessary, this was a logical next step. Stay tuned for several albums already in the works at NeuKraft Records!