Lot Of Strings Music Festival Returns To The Morris Museum's Back Deck

One of the many little miracles during the Pandemic was the Morris Museum's Lot of Strings Festival, which brought some of classical music's finest ensembles to the Museum's Back Deck in the Summer and Fall of 2020.

The museum's unused parking lot was enterprisingly transformed into NJ's newest performance space, able to accommodate over 200 socially-distant music lovers per concert under the sunset skies of Morris County. Some of the best musicians in the world, like Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, The Tesla, JACK and Catalyst String Quartets, shared their prodigious talents under the stars with audiences eager for live entertainment.

After Nicholas Tzavaras and his program of the first three Bach Cello Suites, the schedule for May includes the all-female ensemble The Rhythm Method on Sunday, May 9th, Mother's Day, with a program called Hidden Mothers, which features the work of under-appreciated and under-heard female composers. Catalyst Quartet returns to the Back Deck on Sunday, May 16th for a program featuring African-American composers.

At the end of May, the focus shifts from strings to woodwinds with Back Deck favorites, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra. On May 23rd a Woodwind Quintet from Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will perform a lively and diverse program of woodwind favorites, that includes works by Bach, Ravel, Carl Nielsen and Valerie Coleman of Imani Winds (who will have their own Back Deck evening in August.) On May 30, members of the American Symphony Orchestra dispatch a woodwind trio to serenade us with a French-themed evening that includes the work of Koechlin, Francaix and Poulenc, among others.

In June the strings are back and members of the Orpheus return to the Back Deck twice, June 6th with Mendelssohn's String Quintet and June 20th with string quintets by Dvořák. Tesla Quartet returns to the Back Deck on June 13th and Nicholas Tzavaras will finish his program of Bach Cello Suites on Saturday, June 27th.

All of the Lot of Strings Festival performances begin at 7 pm in April and May, 8 pm, June, July and August and 8 pm in September.

Learn more at morrismuseum.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.