Francesca McNeeley

Francesca McNeeley is a cellist appearing in two upcoming chamber programs, one with the collective A Far Cry in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one at Tanglewood tied to a Boston Symphony Orchestra chamber presentation. The listed programs mix Haitian and contemporary composers with core string quartet repertoire, suggesting a performer active in both new music and the standard chamber canon.

In the Cambridge program, listen for Werner Jaegerhuber's "Plainte Nocturne," a slow, mournful line rooted in Haitian song, set alongside Tippett's First String Quartet, which alternates restless, driving passages with long lyrical stretches. The Perrault and Roumain works bring rhythms and harmonies drawn from Haitian musical traditions into the string quartet format, so expect unconventional textures next to more familiar quartet writing. At Tanglewood, the pairing of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, a piece built from a four note musical signature that recurs like a fingerprint across its five short movements, with Golijov's "Tenebrae" and Schubert's darkly dramatic D minor quartet, points to a program of intensity and shadow, well suited to a cellist comfortable anchoring dense, emotionally charged ensemble writing.