Daedalus Quartet filmed for All Arts program

This past March, 10 technicians and producers from a new PBS television show descended on the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, ringing the balcony with robo-cameras and high-end microphones to film a performance that ties several local strands.

A concert by the Daedalus Quartet, sponsored by the Howland Chamber Music Circle, began streaming at allarts.org earlier this month and will make its broadcast premiere on Sunday (Jan. 11).

Kristy Geslain, who grew up in Beacon and graduated from the old high school, is executive producer for the All Arts Channel, an affiliate of the WNET group (Channel 13). She oversees the show, Passing Notes, which films chamber music ensembles in locales like Caramoor in Westchester County and a catacomb in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery.

Geslain moved back to Beacon a few years ago from Manhattan. It took a nanosecond to zero in on the Daedalus performance in her backyard. That day in March, the ensemble played selections by Haydn and Bartok, as well as String Quartet No. 1, Encountering Lorca, by Debra Kaye, who lives in Beacon.

The program represents some irony: For its 25th anniversary in 2017, the Chamber Music Circle commissioned and premiered Kaye's String Quartet No. 2, Howland Quartet. The filmed performance on All Arts marked the premiere of Encountering Lorca — her first quartet — in its entirety.

"There's another little connection because I got to know the [Daedalus] quartet through the Chamber Circle and I asked them to record Encountering Lorca [in 2023] because they play classical and contemporary repertoire, which is fitting for the type of music I write," Kaye says. "Having them perform it [at the Howland center] felt like a full-circle fruition."

The PBS episode features tight shots of individual musicians and the ensemble, many of which reveal artwork hanging in the background. Sometimes the editors cut to a balcony camera that shows more of the building's interior — and the backs of audience members' heads.

For any musician, it's a thrill to be recognized. Kaye is modest: "It's gratifying to have a performance that hits the mark," she says.

Known for programmatic music, Kaye's quartet evokes the poetry and homeland of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. One movement is titled "Wrestling with the Moon"; another is "The Dance the Turtle Dreamed."

"I started reading Lorca and realized that some of the imagery he uses pops up in different poems, and using the same phrase in different contexts seemed musical to me," she says.

The work opens with pleasant plucking and maintains a judicious balance between consonance and dissonance as tension peaks and plummets before fading out in an abrupt ending, which led to a pregnant pause before the applause.

"For contemporary music, the piece is easy on the ears," says Thomas Kraines, the cellist for the Daedalus Quartet, which has performed 10 times for the Chamber Circle. "Some new works are challenging, but it's like broccoli: It's good for people to be exposed to new ideas that years down the road could be accepted like Haydn and Mozart."

It's tough to top a catacomb in an historic urban cemetery for sonic and visual appeal, but the cultural center in Beacon comes close and is obviously more sentimental to Geslain.

"That's where I took voice lessons as a kid," she says. "I hadn't been there in years, but I saw what great chamber music lineups they had, so when the idea of the new show came up, I figured it would be magical."

"Passing Notes: Daedalus Quartet at the Howland Cultural Center" and other chamber music performances can be streamed at allarts.org/programs/passing-notes, or viewed below. The episode will premiere on PBS at 7 p.m. on Sunday (Jan. 11).