Music at The Red Door series opens Friday
A concert will be held in West Hartford on Oct. 16. Boyd Meets Girl will be playing to an empty room.
The duo – West Hartford native Laura Metcalf on cello and Rupert Boyd on guitar – and a technician or two will be the only people present when the music is performed. All others can watch on live stream.
“As soon as we’re able, it probably won’t be until January, there actually can be people in the room,” said Scott Lamlein, director of music for the Music at The Red Door concert series at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Boyd Meets Girl is kicking off the series’ 2020-21 season, its ninth annual.
“People need music in their lives, especially now, in the midst of this mess. Music provides refreshment, joy, some break from looking online or in the news,” Lamlein said. “But our bishop has not encouraged us to use our spaces yet.”
The COVID-19 pandemic sent a lot of entertainers and venues scrambling to acquire new technology. St. John’s was ahead of the curve. The church at 679
Farmington Ave. had webcasting equipment installed before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus, and long before the state locked down in mid-March.
“We already started live-streaming church services and concerts to folks in Duncaster and other retirement communities,” Lamlein said. “We had no idea we would be using it for our main way to reach people.”
So The Red Door pivoted to all-virtual concerts more quickly than most. Since the quarantine began, St. John’s has streamed 19 concerts, using them to raise money for charities that fight food scarcity.
“People have just been so grateful that something was happening that they could tune in to live,” Lamlein said. “People have been tuning in from across the country. Our mission is our neighborhood, but it’s rewarding to have part of our music family be from far away.”
Boyd Meets Girl
The Oct. 16 concert is a homecoming for Metcalf, and for her cello. Her family went to St. John’s when she was a child. In her senior year at Conard High, she had a cello recital in
the church sanctuary. “That was almost 20 years ago and that was the last time I set foot in the church,” she said.
After Conard Metcalf attended Boston University, then Mannes School of Music at The New School in New York. She lives in Manhattan with Boyd, a native of Australia, who is her husband as well as her partner, and their
2-year-old son Milo.
Their collaboration has resulted in an album and an upcoming second album. Before coronavirus came calling, they traveled the world performing together.
“Cello and guitar are an unusual combination. There is a not a lot of music originally composed for a duo like that. As a result, we do a lot of arranging of classical and nonclassical works,” she said. “We are both classically trained, but good music is good music regardless of the genre.”
At the Red Door concert, the duo will perform Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1; Messiaen’s Praise to the Eternity of Jesus