Boyd Meets Girl returns to Taos
ON SATURDAY (April 30) at 5:30 p.m. at the Taos Community Auditorium, The Taos Chamber Music Group and Taos Center for the Arts host as part of TCMG’s 29th Season live music the husband-wife duo of Australian guitarist Rupert Boyd and American cellist Laura Metcalf, Boyd Meets Girl. They will perform music from their freshly-minted album, “Songs of Love & Despair.”
Tempo invited NYC resident Rupert Boyd to talk about the new album, what is special about their Taos Concert and how he and Laura balance their personal and professional lives.
Please talk about your new album.
We are excited to share with everyone our new album, “Songs of Love & Despair,” which was just released a couple of weeks ago on the Grammy-winning Sono Luminus label. This album is special and meaningful for us; it was conceived, arranged, rehearsed and recorded during the pandemic, and is the music that we were drawn to during this time. When everything shut down, we were fortunate that, as a married couple, we could rehearse every day and without many other commitments (other than looking after our young son), we could learn these pieces and make several arrangements. The repertoire is not all sad or angst-ridden. A lot of the music we were drawn to was a means of escape, whether it be the beauty and light of Debussy’s “Arabesque No. 1” (for solo piano, which we then arranged for our instruments) or the joyousness of the Sonata by Boccherini, these pieces were moments of escape that were much needed, when all we could hear outside our Manhattan apartment was the sound of ambulance sirens. The album dwells a little in the feelings of uncertainty and despair, which I think we all felt during this time, and are most clearly expressed in Messiaen’s “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus.” This movement is from his “Quartet for the End of Time,” written when he was a prisoner of war during WWII. The still, ominous chords in the guitar (written for piano) create an expanse that allows for the long, extended cello lines feel like they contemplate eternity and human existence. Besides these works from the classical canon, we also made our own arrangements for the classical guitar and cello of works by Beyoncé, Radiohead and The Beatles.
We recorded the album in April 2021 at the wonderful Sono Luminus studios in Boyce, Va. We recorded our debut duo album there, and have both recorded solo albums there in the past, and the situation is ideal for recording — the studio is inside a beautifulsounding deconsecrated church in a small town (population 708, I believe) with few distractions and was a perfect way to focus on the recording process.
How is this upcoming concert special for Boyd Meets Girl?
Besides being one of the first concerts we will perform since we have released the album, it’s also one of the first concerts we will play outside of driving distance from New York City. In years passed, we were so used to flying off around the country (and the world) to go play concerts, and for the past two years have been playing within a couple-of-hundred-mile radius of New York City, so it will be wonderful to feel like it is a resumption of former times. We are also both enchanted with and love New Mexico, and so are very excited to return to Taos to share our music with the audiences there. And we are also excited to collaborate in this concert with the Taos flutist, Nancy Laupheimer, who is the director of the Taos Chamber Music Group. We will play a couple of wonderful tangos, written by Astor Piazzolla for just flute and guitar, but we have a wonderful arrangement by Clarice Assad in which she added a cello part, and have also arranged ourselves for another piece for this concert.
How do you and Laura combine your passions, collaborate your talents and keep the home fires burning?
In previous years, we always joked that a reason both our relationship and our duo together thrived was that we were both so busy playing in other ensembles and solo shows, it was so nice to spend some time together when we had the opportunity. After the past two years, having spent all our time together, though, it’s proven that we must like each other, and that our relationship is strong. We also both think that the cello and guitar are such a brilliant combination of instruments — able to play a diverse range of repertoire, and open to making arrangements of music from the Baroque through pop-music. We both have similar likes and tastes in music, but also often bring different things to the table. Laura is a huge Beyoncé fan, and I don’t know that I would have thought of playing her works on cello and guitar by myself. I’m a huge Beatles fan, and it was natural to bring that to the table.
Tickets are available at tcataos.org/ tickets, and more information can be found at taoschambermusicgroup.org. For questions, please contact info@ tcataos.org.
‘Besides these works from the classical canon, we also made our own arrangements for the classical guitar and cello of works by Beyoncé, Radiohead and The Beatles.’