Announcing Our 2024-25 Season
Chamber Music continues for a 68th season!
Since its founding in 1956, Friends of Chamber Music has brought world-class classical musicians to Stockton to the delight of audiences from around the Central Valley. From presenting established artists to highlighting up-and-coming musical talents, the range of concert programming we’ve offered over the years has made a positive impact on the state of the arts in our community. We firmly believe that our 68th season continues that work, and we’re excited to share the lineup of the new season with you!
Season Tickets Available Soon!
Pro Arte Quartet
September 29, 2024
Resident quartet of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the longest-running continuously active chamber ensemble in the world. Founded by conservatory students in Brussels in 1912, it became one of the most celebrated ensembles in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and was named Court Quartet to the Queen of Belgium. Its world reputation blossomed in 1919 when the quartet began the first of many tours that enticed notable composers such as Milhaud, Honegger, Martin, and Casella to write new works for the ensemble. As the first and only quartet ever to reach its centennial anniversary (2012), the Pro Arte’s 100th birthday was the occasion for a grand multi-year celebration.
Pro Arte Quartet was scheduled to open our last season but had to cancel at the last minute due to illness. We’re grateful they’ve agreed to come back for this season!
Beo String Quartet
October 20, 2024
Beo in a nutshell: With 65 world premieres to its credit and 150 concert works played throughout the United States, South America, and Europe, the iconoclastic Beo String Quartet does what it loves best: playing classical repertoire, contemporary, rock, and experimental music. From the Latin “to make happy,” Beo started out as a lark. Two Mexican-American brothers, Jason Neukom and Sean Neukom, decided to record a song entitled “Happy, Happy,” composed by Sean, but for that they would need two more players. And so in 2015 the Beo String Quartet was formed. Touring the world, composing, performing, recording, teaching, and having fun, Beo has since then founded Beo Publishing, built a recording studio, and started its own recording label, NeuKraft Records.
The eclectic and highly polished quartet, founded in 2015, has created a niche for itself as a daring, genre-defying ensemble. Rigorously trained in the classical tradition, violinists Jason Neukom and Andrew Giordano, violist Sean Neukom, and cellist Ryan Ash also know their way around contemporary expression, including the use of electronics, live sound processing, and spatial audio manipulation. Their performances of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or Shostakovich have been compared to those of the best among 21 st century international string quartets.
Hub New Music
November 3, 2024
Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “prime mover of piping hot 21st century repertoire” (Washington Post). Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub’s “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers on projects that traverse today’s rich musical landscape.
Recent and upcoming performances include concerts presented by the Kennedy Center, Seattle Symphony, Morgan Library, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), the Williams Center for the Arts, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, King’s Place (London), Soka Performing Arts Center, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, and the Celebrity Series of Boston.
Carion Wind Quintet
February 9, 2025
The prize-winning Danish-Latvian ensemble brings truly unique and innovative chamber music experience to audiences. CARION fascinates with it’s carefully choreographed and dramatized performances of classical and modern works, making music on stage visible, thus adding a new dimension to traditional concert events.
No chairs. No music stands, nothing. The way Carion fill the stage with musical and emotional content is something remarkable –
Allgemeine Zeitung
CARION’S fresh approach to chamber music has brought acclaimed performances in Europe’s most prestigious festivals like Rheingau Festival, Kissinger Sommer, Beethovenfest Bonn, Bergen Festival, Tonhalle MAAG as well as has earned standing ovations from audiences of the USA, South America and the the Far East. CARION has released 6 highly critically acclaimed CDs – including stellar reviews from Gramophone and BBC magazine, awards from Danish radio and best classical album of 2015 on iTunes. But nothing compares to their trend setting music videos on Youtube that continue generating views counted in millions, the landmark performance of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles being used as an example and a reference recording to music students worldwide.
Italian Saxophone Quartet
April 13, 2025
Returning to FOCM for the first time since 2013, Italian Saxophone Quartet continues to delight audiences around the world.
With its 40 year history, the Italian Saxophone Quartet is one of the longest-lived groups currently active on the world stage. Shortly after their founding, the ISQ won a number of important chamber music competitions, including the unanimous First Prize at the prestigious Premio Ancona. Since then, they have been giving exciting and eclectic performances to adoring crowds from New York to Moscow, Athens to Tokyo.
Over 40 compositions written by eminent contemporary composers have been dedicated to the ISQ. The ISQ has performed the world and/or European premieres of many eminent composers such as Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Luciano Berio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Franco Donatoni, Henri Pousseur, and the American composer Joe Harnell.