Our Beehive Chamber Series opens with The Happiest of Times. We begin with the Danish String Quarter’s haunting arrangement of Unst Boat Song, a Shetland folk prayer traditionally sung to sailors by their families left on shore. We continue with William Grant Stills’ Danzas de Panama, based on a collection of Panamanian folk dances collected by Elizabeth Waldo in the 1940s, in four vivid movements. Our program ends with Felix Mendelssohn’s very first string quartet, Opus 12, No. 1. Only twenty years old at the time, Mendelssohn wrote with the classicism of his day while pushing the expressive envelope, setting the stage for a fruitful career as one of the greatest chamber music composers the world has ever known.

Unst Boat Song: trad., arr Danish String Quartet

Danzas de Panama: William Grant Still

String Quartet, Op. 12, No. 1: Felix Mendelssohn

Art by Devon Kelley-Yurdin