2024 has been an eventful year for the Eybler Quartet and we thought it would be fun to share a short recap of the year with you, our dear friends and supporters!
Our Ontario concert series, with concerts mostly in Toronto, Hamilton and St. Catharines continued, and we were honoured to be invited in February to be part of the inaugural season of the St. Thomas Friends of Music series (https://www.stthomas.on.ca/friends-of-music) at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church in Toronto.
In late March we were off to Boston and Cambridge, MA where we were the guest presenters for the annual Rita E. Hauser Forum at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard. Invited by Suzannah Clark, whom you might remember from our Inside the Music program in Ontario in March 2023, we presented All the Feelings: The Embodiment of Passion in the String Quartet in the 18th Century which was extremely well-received; you can watch it here! While at Harvard we gave a presentation and offered masterclasses to the chamber music class run by the Parker Quartet, our dear colleagues from the Banff Evolution:Quartet program. At the invitation of Guy Fishman, head of the Historical Performance Department at New England Conservatory, we gave a lecture and offered a masterclass to three talented and hard-working young quartets.
With a student at Harvard after our masterclass
In April, under the aegis of the Gallery Players of Niagara, we offered our first adaptive concert in Thorold, ON. These are informal concerts aimed at removing barriers around the traditional concert experience. While we were hoping initially to appeal to the neuroatypical community, we ended up attracting a widely diverse crowd, including young families with infants and children. This was one of our most satisfying concert-giving experiences of the year, and we are planning more for the future!
In August, we were off to Peru for our first ever South American appearances. We played concerts in Lima, Arequipa, and Cusco, the latter two being UNESCO World Heritage sites. In Lima, we were hosted for a brief rehearsal period by the Universidad Nacional de Música, and we played a concert for the students there who were just arriving for their winter term. This also gave us an opportunity for a lively question and answer session with some VERY keen young musicians. Our main concert in Lima was presented by the Sociedad Filarmónica de Lima, and we were graciously hosted by Pilar Izquierdo and her team.
We next headed to Arequipa, a beautiful colonial city, which also happens to be the birthplace of the composer Pedro Ximénes Abrill Tirado (1784-1852). We built our program for this tour around his recently rediscovered library, and it was a thrill to be in some of the same places he was and walk some of the same streets. Our concert there, presented by Fernando Alvarez in association with the textile manufacturers Qori and Qiviuk, was in the spectacular Monastero de Santa Catalina.
Our final stop was Cusco, and by careful manipulation of our schedule, three of us carved out a day to tick off the bucket list item and visit Machu Picchu!
Cusco itself is a fantastic city, really a palimpsest of the ancient, colonial and the modern. Our concert there was in the small but exquisite Templo de San Blas, presented by the ever-gracious Ivan Zignaigo and the Festival del Barocco Latinoamericano. Here’s a link to a video of the live concert there.
As part of this program, we chose to present Ximénes’s masterful String Quintet, Op. 38, which meant we needed a fifth musician, in this case the violinist/violist Cristina Prats Costa. Not only was she a wonderful addition to the group, but being a native Spanish speaker opened many opportunities for us and eased a multitude of complications (yes, I’m looking at you various airlines that sell the group a ticket for the cello and then FREAK OUT when they see it in real life…). To say that Cristina saved our bacon more than once is not an exaggeration! Overall, we had an incredible time, meeting a sea of lovely and generous people, eating delicious food, being warmly received by enthusiastic audiences. We have already heard from several presenters in South America interested in another tour!!
The Eyblers with Cristina Prats Costa in Lima
September was another busy month beginning with our Annual Free Concert in the Park, organized by Chris Reed and Valerie Schweitzer. This tradition began in 2020, as Chris and Valerie’s valiant response to COVID lockdowns and gathering restrictions. That year we performed as a trio, Julia, Patrick, and Margaret, and it was an incredibly powerful moment for us as a group to play before a live audience in those days. This year it worked its magic again by attracting many of our fans but also diverse groups of passersby!
We then headed to New Brunswick where we celebrated our 20th anniversary by playing the opening concert of the 20th anniversary edition of the Sackville Festival of Early Music. We presented our All the Feelings lecture at Mount Allison, conducted open rehearsals with the students there (again with lively question and answer sessions!) and were the very happy guests of the incredibly inspiring El Sistema program in Moncton. We also played our Halifax debut concert on the same weekend.
At the El Sistema school in Moncton, NB
In November we launched our 20 for 20 series, a celebration of our 20th season in which we will present all six of Haydn's exquisite Op. 20 quartets in several concerts throughout Ontario.
The end of November saw the release of our 8th studio album and our first with violinist Patricia Ahern: Franz Weiss, Two Quartets, Op. 8 “Razumovsky”. In recognition of our work on this recording project, we were, together with the musicologist Dr. Mark Ferraguto, recipients of the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg award. Mark joined us for the CD release events, and it was a lot of fun to have him there for wide-ranging discussions of the entire project with our audiences!
The Eyblers with Mark Ferraguto at the Heliconian Club in Toronto
The album is available for streaming on all major platforms (Apple Music, Spotify, etc.). Sales of the CD and the Dolby/Atmos download have been encouraging, and we are looking forward to more critical response once the dust of the holiday season settles!
Beyond our 20 for 20 series for this concert season, we will also be presenting most of Mozart’s 6 quartets dedicated to Haydn as well as the recently rediscovered Op. 14 string quartets of Joseph Bologne, le Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
Our vision and goal, as you know, is to present better and less well-known works from the first 150 years of the string quartet repertoire. Our last two recordings were relatively obscure composers so it’s about time for a better-known set! Our next recording project is slated to be the 6 Mozart quartets dedicated to Joseph Haydn!!
Thank you to all our amazingly supportive audience members at home and around the world. And a special thank you to our generous supporters who make so much of this possible. All the best for 2025!