The fivebyfive chamber ensemble announces its 2024-2025 season with the “Our Stories” concert series in Syracuse and Rochester, featuring “Fantastical Stories (Historias Fantásticas)” in the fall, “Enduring Stories” in the spring, and the release of their fourth album, Eclipse, to bridge the two programs.
fivebyfive is a Rochester based chamber ensemble of five professional musicians and one video and audio artist dedicated to cross-genre programming and commissioning new works from artists who are underrepresented in their field. Standard programs are composed of music written for flute, clarinet, electric guitar, piano, and bass- however, as is the norm with fivebyfive, this season is to be anything but standard. This year, new pieces will include banjo, fiddle, and voice.
The evolutions in this year’s programming does not stop there. In addition, the ensemble will be performing folk songs, ghost stories, ballads, and original poetry, as well as newly commissioned works by renowned composers Roberto Sierra and Emily Pinkerton.
For the fall concert series on October 5 and 6, fivebyfive will perform “Fantastical Stories (Historias Fantásticas)”, featuring a newly commissioned piece from Ithaca-based Grammy-nominated composer Roberto Sierra, Sonidos Del Tiön. Sierra utilized the Argentine poet Jorge Borges’ story to weave a composition of both fantasy and reality. In addition to Sierra, the concert will highlight other Latin American composers including Clarice Assad and Miguel del Aguila. Musicians from Society of New Music will perform select pieces as well.
In the Spring program on March 29 and 30, a mix of chamber and folk music will be performed in “Enduring Stories”, a collaboration between fivebyfive and songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emily Pinkerton of Albany. Throughout her new work “Ephemera Ballads” Pinkerton will play the banjo and fiddle alongside the ensemble, adding her voice to the mix as well. The ballads represent the lost voices of the Appalaichan and Catskills women of over two hundred years ago, whose stories of struggles with class, gender, and bodily autonomy still resonate to this day.
In addition to these two exciting programs, the ensemble will be releasing its fourth album Eclipse on November 8. Distributed by Grammy-nominated label Bright Shiny Things, Eclipse features four pieces commissioned by fivebyfive for last April’s North American Total Solar Eclipse.
Earlier this year, the ensemble held three sold-out shows at Rochester’s Strasenburgh Planetarium performing the tracks alongside an immersive video created by fivebyfive’s executive director Marc Webster. The composers include Jessica Meyer (“In the Path of Totality”), Marc Mellits (“Eclipse”), Kamala Sankaram (“Under the Shadow”), and Genesee Valley native Glenn McClure (“Totality”).
Performances for “Fantastical Stories (Historias Fantásticas)” will be at the Onondaga Community College in Syracuse on October 5 and the Hochstein Performance Hall in Rochester on October 6. For more details and tickets, please visit here.
Performances for “Enduring Stories” will be at the May Memorial Unitarian in Syracuse on March 29 and the Rochester Academy of Medicine on March 30. For more details and tickets, please visit here.
To learn more about fivebyfive, Eclipse, and other events, please visit their website here.
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