Flagler Museum's Tuesday night chamber music concerts return Feb. 6

The Flagler Museum’s annual Tuesday night concerts of chamber music return for another season beginning Feb. 6, opening with a young New York-based string quartet.

Since 2002, chamber groups and solo instrumentalists have appeared in the Music Room at Whitehall, performing their programs in a resonant space, and then meeting audience members afterward for champagne, refreshments and conversation.

The concerts are recorded and regularly featured on National Public Radio's "Performance Today." A performance of a Haydn piano trio by the Summit Trio recorded in last year's series was featured on Jan. 10's edition of the radio program.

This year’s season opens with the Ulysses Quartet, a foursome that recently became the first quartet-in-residence for Boston’s GBH Music. Formed in 2015, the quartet — violinists Christina Bouey and Rhiannon Banerdt, violist Colin Brookes, and cellist Grace Ho — won top prizes at the Fischoff and Schoenfeld competitions and from 2019 to 2022 was the graduate resident string quartet at the Juilliard School.

The program includes the String Quartet No. 2 of Felix Mendelssohn, the second “Rasumovsky” Quartet of Beethoven (Quartet No. 8), and the sole string quartet of the pioneering 20th-century French composer Germaine Tailleferre.

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Next up on Feb. 13 is the American violinist Elissa Lee Koljonen, a protégé of the violin pedagogue Aaron Rosand, with whom she studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in her native Philadelphia. The first winner of the Henryk Szeryng Foundation Award, she has appeared around the world with major orchestras and in leading concert venues.

She will be accompanied by pianist Sheng-Yuan Kuan, who teaches at Lynn University in Boca Raton. Koljonen’s program includes two celebrated showpieces, J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D minor and Ravel’s “Tzigane,” as well as a scherzo by Brahms, Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3 and two pieces by the short-lived French composer Lili Boulanger, sister of the teacher Nadia Boulanger.

The eclectic Pittsburgh-based Beo String Quartet, founded in 2015 by brothers Jason (violin) and Sean (viola) Neukom, embodies the kind of multigenre music making typical of today’s classical players. Champions of new music, they have given 65 world premieres, founded their own label and built a recording studio.

Their concert Feb. 20 focuses on Austro-German repertory, beginning with a string quartet by Haydn (Op. 33, No. 5), followed by selected fugues from Bach’s final, incomplete work, "The Art of Fugue." The second half of the program is devoted to the String Quartet No. 15 (in A minor) of Beethoven.

The Anzavoorian Sisters from suburban Chicago perform Feb. 27 on the series. Pianist Marta and cellist Ani have programmed a selection of four pieces by the late-Romantic Armenian priest and composer Komitas (born Soghomon Soghomanian), cello sonatas by Debussy and Brahms (No. 1 in E minor), the “Suite Populaire Espagnole” of Manuel de Falla, and a showstopper, the “Variations on One String on a Theme by Rossini,” by Nicolo Paganini.

Marta Aznavoorian is the pianist for the Chicago-based Lincoln Trio, and Ani Aznavoorian is the principal cellist for Camerata Pacifica, based in Santa Barbara, California. Both sisters have enjoyed distinguished careers as soloists with major orchestras and can be heard on numerous recordings.

The final concert in the series, set for March 5, continues the Chicago connection with the Black Oak Ensemble, a string trio that features violinist Desirée Ruhstrat and cellist David Cunliffe of the Lincoln Trio, and violist Aurélien Fort Pederzoli, one of the founders of Chicago’s now-disbanded Spektral Quartet.

The Black Oak program includes an early Serenade by Beethoven and an incomplete string trio by Schubert. The concert opens with the Aria from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” and concludes with a string trio written in 1926 by the French composer Jean Cras. This trio was one of seven little-known French string trios written between the two world wars that Black Oak featured in its 2022 recording "Avant l'Orage (Before the Storm)."

Tickets for each of the concerts, which includes a post-concert champagne reception, are $75 ($350 for all five). Concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. For tickets or more information, call 561-655-2833 or visit flaglermuseum.us.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Flagler Museum offers five-concert music series starting Feb. 6