Mezzo soprano will join string instruments at Howland

This weekend, Grammy-Award winning singer Fleur Barron and the Parker Quartet are riding the Brooklyn-to-Beacon pipeline to road test a two-year-old work before heading into a Manhattan studio to record it.

On Saturday (April 25), they will perform at National Sawdust, followed on Sunday by a trip to the Howland Cultural Center as part of the Chamber Music Circle series.

Novel combinations have been a theme of the 2025-26 season, with previous concerts by a cello quartet and a reed quintet. The pairing of mezzo-soprano with a traditional string quartet is so unusual that the Boston-based group commissioned "the field remembers" by Chinese American composer Anthony Cheung.

Another work on the program is a Schubert lieder written for piano and voice arranged for two violins, viola and cello by Ken Hamao, one of the Parker violinists. Other pieces include quartets by Schubert and Philip Glass.

Barron, who lives in London, tours the world to accompany prominent orchestras and made her New York Philharmonic debut with conductor Gustavo Dudamel last month. Schubert's vocal works, along with those by Bach, Mahler, Ravel and Debussy, land in her wheelhouse, she says, but she also champions new music.

"It's always nice to hear works from the great composers we know and love, but it's also good to bask in the familiar and discover something new," she says.

Barron met a couple of quartet members at a festival, developed a relationship, and the commission concept developed. Since 2014, the quartet has held an artist-in-residence at Harvard University, which helped support the project.

Hamao says the musicians chose Cheung because he writes well for the format, and he's also experienced with vocal parts, which is unusual, says Barron. They let the composer choose the texts.

The ensemble has performed the piece three times, she says, and the first of six "ambitious" movements, according to Hamao, is available online. Barron calls it "complicated"; the opening section includes a speaking part.

"Since 2020, it's been important for me to feature chamber music works related to the Asian diaspora," says Barron, who is of English and Singaporean decent. She notes that the text in "the field remembers" is written in English by Chinese American poets.

"I sing and commission a lot of songs from all over Asia. Singapore is such a melting pot that I feel like it's important and part of my artistic responsibility to highlight these beautiful, creative works."

Beyond promoting Asian-themed music, the Parker Quartet embarks on other missions in its hometown, says Hamao: "We perform in homeless shelters, community centers and youth programs. For a 20th-anniversary Beethoven project [in 2022], we had some moving moments, like playing at a recovery shelter for three weeks in a row. The people came out, and hopefully the music uplifted them."

The Howland Cultural Center is located at 477 Main St. in Beacon. Tickets for the April 26 concert, which begins at 4 p.m., are $5 to $35 at howlandmusic.org/tickets.