Beo String Quartet

Beo String Quartet will play at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 9 on Walnut Plaza.

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 or 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. Works such as “Haydn Recycled” and “Projection 1: Triple Quartet” combine virtuosic quartet writing and staging in various forms. To date, Beo has performed more than 100 concert works, including some 45 world premieres, throughout Europe and the United States.

Beo regularly collaborates with living composers including 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 hosts an annual Composition Competition which yields a winning work selected from 100+ submissions. The quartet then records the composition and makes a point of programming it frequently 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 has shared these engaging experiences with more than 3,500 students to date.