The South Beach Chamber Ensemble quartet, in an undated performance at The Betsy hotel on South Beach. From left: Karen Lord Powell, Sheena Gutierrez (violins), Michael Andrews (cello), Eric Eakes (viola)
There are great reasons to live in Miami Beach.
“The music-making in public, there’s so much interaction,” says South Beach Chamber Ensemble founder and cellist Michael Andrews. “It’s delightful. We played on Ocean Drive for Art Basel, and people started dancing to ‘Hallelujah’ in the street.”
Andrews has made sure that South Beach Chamber Ensemble capitalized on that energy over the course of its 25 years. The SBCE’s Music in Beautiful Spaces series tours museums, galleries, hotels and other non-traditional performance spaces. The group’s Music in Motion concerts extended performances to South America. And the South Beach Up North summer series, started in 2006, visits Andrews’s hometown of Wausau, Wisconsin and surrounding towns each August.
Andrews has assembled a fluid group of musicians, performing frequently in piano trio and string quartet versions. He started smart, in 1997, with a distinguished mentor.
“I was looking for a violinist,” Andrews says, “and I called Tom Moore.” Thomas Moore had once been a member of the venerable Pro Arte Quartet, yet in existence more than a century after its 1912 founding. In the late ’90s, Moore was teaching at Barry University in Miami.
“Tom was a legend—I had heard him when he was in Pro Arte, back when I was a student in Wisconsin in the ’60s. But by the time I called him I hadn’t seen him in 30 years. He agreed to play a concert, for free, that got us going.
“His presence helped establish the group, and he played with us until died of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer in 2011. He was a great colleague and friend.”
That start began decades of innovative performances. Recent initiatives include a series of Black Voices programs, created during the pandemic, and directly inspired by the cataclysmic social upheaval during the summer of 2020.
“I was in Wisconsin, near Twin Cities, when George Floyd died,” Anderson says. “We created Black Voices, an evening with music by George Walker, Jessie Montgomery and Daniel Bernard Roumain.” That program continued a long association with the music of Roumain (DBR), focused primarily on his series of string quartets that are fashioned on the memory of five prominent Black leaders. “This time we did the Maya Angelou movement,” Anderson says. “People loved DBR’s music so much.”
Anderson live-streamed those concerts out of necessity, but the future of SBCE remains firmly focused on live performances.
“We got through the pandemic year,” he says. “Now, if we get more funding, we’ll do more concerts. My goal would be one a month during the season, both in Miami Beach and then Coral Gables or somewhere in Miami-Dade County.
“For the summer now we’re playing trios in three locations, and I’d like to replicate that with the string quartet. We’re adding concerts around our home base in Wausau.
“Last year when we played the trios we had standing room only,” he says. “People were thirsty for live music.”—Keith Powers