Beo String Quartet will perform two one-hour pop-up concerts at 2:35 p.m. Friday, July 31 and 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4 on Walnut Plaza. These casual outdoor concerts invite audience members to actively participate by selecting and requesting pieces from the musical menu, shaping the program on the spot. This interactive format delivers a dynamic and memorable afternoon of chamber music outdoors.
The eclectic and highly polished Beo String Quartet, founded in 2015, has created a niche for itself as a daring, genre-defying ensemble. Rigorously trained in the classical tradition, violinists Jason Neukom and Andrew Giordano, violist Sean Neukom and cellist Ryan Ash also know their way around contemporary expression, including the use of electronics, live sound
processing and spatial audio manipulation.
Their performances of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich have been compared to those of the best among 21st-century international string quartets. They play the masters in a variety of settings, collaborate with living composers and explore technology’s capacity to the fullest. To date, Beo String Quartet has performed more than 100 concert works, including some 45 world premieres, throughout Europe and the U.S.
The quartet collaborates with composers Richard Danielpour, Marc Mellits, Missy Mazzoli, Lawrence Dillon, Joel Hoffman and Charles Nichols. As part of their annual residency with the Charlotte New Music Festival, Beo String Quartet hosts a Composition Competition that yields a winning work selected from 100+ submissions. The quartet then records it and makes a point of programming it in subsequent seasons.
Music education outreach is essential to the quartet’s vision. Through its educational tours of elementary, middle and high schools, short-term residencies at colleges and universities, and its annual residency at Dakota Chamber Music, Beo String Quartet has shared these engaging experiences with more than 3,500 students to date.
