Tag: audience

  • Sotheby’s Real Estate Office hostsJP Tiny Desk Concert series

    Local real estate agent Brian Fizer has turned Sotheby’s real estate office into an intimate concert venue on select Thursday nights in Jamaica Plain. Free to attend, the “JP Tiny Desk Concert Series” features Boston musicians with a side of charcuterie boards and the opportunity to bring your own booze. 

    “Every event people say ‘Oh, this is the highlight of my week…it’s so nice to see this space right in the middle of JP used this way,’ ” said Fizer in a recent interview. “It’s all been great feedback.”

    Located at 673 Centre St., Sotheby’s doubles as a hub for neighbors to unite over local music that Fizer said feeds off community camaraderie. Just behind its reception desk wall, Sotheby’s office adds itself to JP’s reserved scene of daily shows at Midway Café and weekly sessions at Brendan Behan Pub.  

    “Community is really important in JP, but let’s do something just to give back to the community,” said Fizer on his motivations to create the concert series. “It was just a way for us to reach out to people.”

    Fizer called on Carol Palmer and Andrew Brilliant — his coworkers on the Brilliant Places real estate team — to help form the series. Palmer and Brilliant’s experience helping throw JP First Thursdays helped bring Fizer’s idea to life. Tiny Desk will have its third session Feb. 12 featuring the Sado Domestics, a grassroots trio that will bring an upbeat, rock-driven sound. Fizer has noticed the crowd grow to upwards of 40 people, spanning from children to retirees. 

    “I remember thinking like there’s just not a lot of instances in our current society where you get to hang out across generations,” said Fizer. 

    The Sado-Domestics will be the first group to break from the jazz theme lineup. According to the band’s website, their “sound is an acoustic-leaning blend of folk, roots and rock.” The group will perform as a trio, with lead singers and guitarists Chris Gleason and Lucy Martinez joining Jimmy Ryan on the mandolin.

    Åsa Runefelt, a jazz vocalist and Berklee College of Music graduate, highlighted Fizer’s commitment to creating the “intimate” and “live” space the poster tagline advertises. She said she felt thankful not only for his generosity to open up the office, but to the venue’s ironically good acoustics.

    “It happens to be a really great venue,” said Runefelt. “He thinks about the lighting, there’s some art on the walls, the chairs are comfortable, but it’s close enough to the musicians.”

    Runefelt performed alongside Brian Freeman, accompanying her vocals on the piano as she sang from her debut album “Night Flower,” released in December. Runefelt said the crowd responded with heartfelt claps to her new releases, whereas Tiny Desk fulfilled her wish to find a sharable concert building. It was just last year she walked the streets of JP to find an office that could benefit from hosting events after store hours.

    “I thought ‘maybe there’s a possibility here for sharing a space, and then he just comes up with his idea,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

    As a performer Runefelt elaborated on the freedom jazz breeds to create an improvised sound experience, especially when live. She said that music has a power to bring people together who may be strangers due to its finite lifespan.

    “Making a painting, this painting hangs there, you can enjoy it forever, but for musicians, it’s just a fleeting moment of living,” said Runefelt.

    Gleason, the co-lead singer of the Sado-Domestics, praised the mutual benefit to the audience and artist. Gleason performs all around Greater Boston, with monthly concerts at the Square Root in Roslindale and at the Sanctuary Cultural Arts Center in Maynard. He said that now more than ever in-person events can positively impact people who otherwise would stay inside.

    “Music is therapeutic, but it’s good for the audience, too,” he said. “We all spend so much time on our devices or watching television.”

    Fizer also said Tiny Desk can inspire a digital detox for attendees in its third space. He deemed  Sotheby’s intimate setup as an unplugged experience where people can socialize with less digital interaction.

    “It’s just, ‘you’re here to enjoy music, right?” said Fizer. “You see people talking to each other, which is really cool and doesn’t always happen in an East Coast city.”

    But as far as an official goal for Tiny Desk, Fizer settles on community. 

    “Human connection, interaction, community — and what better way to do it than listening to music that perhaps is a genre you’ve never listened to,” he said. “We feel that’s kind of the anecdote to a lot of our problems.”

  • Two worlds on the same street: How a violin bridges Beacon Hill with the unhoused community 

    In the small, dimly-lit community center turned chamber hall on 74 Joy St., Jennifer Stevens is brought back to her grandparents’ living room. There, she would watch the piano strings dance as her great uncle played. Sometimes she sat beneath the baby grand, enveloped in the amplified acoustics of the instrument’s underbelly. 

    “That was my playground,” she said. 

    The benefit concert held on Oct. 15 for Shelter Music Boston, performed by the organization’s artistic director and internationally-acclaimed violinist, Adrian Anantawan, aimed to provide Stevens’ experience to the thousands of homeless people living just outside the cozy confines of Beacon Hill. 

    More than 5,500 people live without shelter in Boston, according to the 2025 U.S. census.

    “For many people, connecting them to music, particularly classical music, brings them back to a simpler time, when life was less complicated,” said Mark Lippolt, who works for the organization’s development committee. 

    Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, Shelter Music Boston will perform more than 100 free concerts this year at shelters for homeless people, those recovering from substance abuse, or fleeing domestic violence. 

    “Classical music unfortunately can be seen as something that’s very ivory tower, and only for people who can afford it,” said violinist Anantawan, who was born without a right hand. Whether life’s challenges stem from a disability or other circumstances, the Canadian musician says the stigma is the same.

    “That’s always been a big mission for me,” Anantawan said, “to be able to find ways that this particular art form can be accessible and inclusive for as many people as possible, and to try to remove the stigma of what or who this music is for.”

    At 10 years old, Anantawan’s elementary school required students to pick up the recorder. With only five fingers, that simply wasn’t an option, and he and his parents began searching for a more suitable instrument. Anantawan found his calling on a Sesame Street episode featuring violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman. It was the first time the aspiring musician saw someone on TV who somewhat resembled him.

    “He had polio, a disability as well, but played the instrument beautifully,” Anantawan said. He told his parents he’d made his choice.

    With the aid of a prosthetic adapted to hold his bow, Anantawan has now played all around the world, from the White House to the Athens and Vancouver Olympics. He has performed for Pope John Paul II, the late Christopher Reeve and the Dalai Lama. 

    Amidst his piling accolades, Anantawan partnered with a hospital and after-school program to make chamber music accessible to children with disabilities. Now he says he hopes to bring his local, disadvantaged community the same sense of fulfillment he found through the violin. 

    When Shelter Music Boston plays for homeless communities, Anantawan said musicians are not only performing, they are pronouncing the audience worthy of beautiful music.

    The night of the concert in Beacon Hill, Anantawan and his piano accompanist, Jennifer Hsiao, played a lullaby by the Indian American composer, Reena Esmail. Some audience members closed their eyes, others swayed to the melody. When the song ended, Anantawan opened the floor to a discussion, and attendees shared feelings evoked by the performance. 

    In a neighborhood where the average home value exceeds $1 million, Anantawan said that night’s conversation reminded him of audience reactions at shelters. 

    “All of us come from a parent or a family, and our hope is that the music that we continue to play really resonates with you as much as someone in a shelter,” Anantawan said to the audience. 

    Even though classical music was first composed for kings and queens, he said, “they were getting at very human elements that can be accessible to any of us.”

    Anantawan said he hopes the opportunities afforded by affluence isn’t lost on Beacon Hill’s residents. “What do we do to be able to make sense of that privilege?” he asks. “And what do you do as responsible members of the community to be able to uplift and to see all people as whole people?”

    The evening closed with a three-part sonata by the French composer Claude Debussy, a piece that blends a disparate array of styles and techniques. The bow drew out the ethereal first act, abruptly followed by the sinister, dance-like rhythms of the second. The violinist and accompanist suspend the musical tension for more than 10 minutes before taking a breath in sync, releasing the final act’s rapid triumph. 

    “You’re really getting a sense of the work that we do here,” Antawan said, addressing the audience. “Which is, essentially, the human universal work of just making spaces beautiful and making our worlds as beautiful as we can through this power of art and music.”