A family string quartet that plays everything from Mozart to Queen and a violinist’s account of life on the international stage will mark 31 years of Neskowin Chamber Music this weekend. The celebration pairs a free concert at the Lincoln City Cultural Center on Saturday, Nov. 14, with a ticketed performance at Winema Chapel in Cloverdale on Sunday, Nov. 15.
Saturday’s concert features the Quartissimos: violinist Anthea Kreston, her husband Jason and their daughters, Tzippora and Mirabai. All four began playing between the ages of two and six. The family spent four years in Berlin, where Anthea became the first American violinist to join Germany’s Artemis Quartet. In Oregon, she plays first violin with the Delgani String Quartet and Jason conducts the Corvallis Youth Symphony. On weekends, they play quartets with their daughters.
On Sunday, Anthea will blend storytelling and live music in “Crescendo: Stories and Performance from an Adventurous Life in Music,” a program drawn from her memoir. Her stories range from Tajikistan to Carnegie Hall and include the time she played “Danny Boy” for an Irish police officer to get out of a traffic ticket.
The memoir traces her path from leaving home at 16 and studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music to burning out and stepping away from the classical music world for a commune in Oregon. She kept playing the violin and eventually returned to the concert stage. She writes candidly about years of infertility, raising a family while pursuing a performing career and trying to hold on to her sense of self and her marriage under the pressures of quartet life in Germany.
She toured with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project from 2000 to 2004 and has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic. Her Sunday program includes Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” the “Preludio” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Partita No. 3 in E Major,” the “Obsession” prelude from Eugène Ysaÿe’s “Sonata for Solo Violin in A Minor” and the “Allegro” from Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet.
Saturday’s free concert begins at 2 pm at the Lincoln City Cultural Center, located at 540 NE Hwy. 101. Sunday’s performance begins at 2 pm at Winema Chapel, located at 5195 Winema Road in Cloverdale. Tickets for Sunday are $40. For more information and tickets, go to neskowinchambermusic.org.