Community Partnership: Greetings and Salutations

Creating community through shared experiences is a powerful way to combat isolation and forge new connections. Sheffield Chamber Players Is committed to bringing chamber music to older adults in senior living and memory care communities throughout the Greater Boston area, continuing our successful model of presenting chamber music in intimate spaces—often private homes—for years. Residents enjoy high-quality chamber music in a comfortable and familiar setting, such as a community room, performance hall, or common living space just steps from where they live.

A musical dialogue among three unmistakable voices, Greetings and Salutations opens with Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint, whose title is drawn from a Japanese wood-block art typically using precious “Prussian Blue” ink. Shaw describes this piece, and chamber music itself, as a “conversation without words”. Here, she converses with Diné-Navajo composer Juantio Becenti and 20th century great Benjamin Britten. For our third commission, Juantio Becenti is writing a quartet for Sheffield in which different musical styles will talk with one another; and Britten’s final major work, his 3rd Quartet, is his simultaneous greeting and farewell to the beauties and mysteries of life.

PROGRAM

Blueprint | Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)

World Premiere string quartet commissioned by Sheffield Chamber Players | Juantio Becenti (b. 1983)

String Quartet No. 3 | Benjamin Britten (1913—1976)