Portland string ensemble fills barn to the rafters with ‘Serenades’

Palaver Strings performs at Brooksville fundraiser for Bagaduce Music

Aug. 3, 2026

By Rebecca Nemser

Palaver Strings at the July 29 event at David Folly’s Farm. Photo by John Boit.

Serenades was the theme of the July 29 benefit concert for Bagaduce Music in the barn at David’s Folly Farm, featuring Palaver Strings, a Portland-based musician-led string ensemble.

“A serenade is sung to somebody, for a reason, and that’s what Palaver hopes to do in these troubled times — to send out a message — an umbrella of hope,” said Teagan Faran, co-curator of the concert. 

Bagaduce Music began as a small lending library of printed sheet music and has expanded to house a collection of millions of pages, stage concerts, and provide musical education in a large campus on South Street in Blue Hill. Maya French, violinist and Palaver’s co-artistic director, spoke of the importance in her own life of both Kneisel Hall, with its focus on classical music, and Bagaduce Music, with its strong connections to folk music and the folk music community. 

The show began with a rousing sea shanty sung by Bennett Konesni, the director of Bagaduce Music, and continued with a series of serenades, creatively re-imagined for the 13-person string ensemble.

The concert evoked sounds of the sea. Video by John Boit.

“One of the biggest joys of playing in Palaver is the ability to write for the group, to write for a person rather than an instrument,” Faran said. “Between Worlds by Carlos Simon is for solo string, but I got his blessing to expand it out — to take one person’s story and embody it in 13 different voices.”

She also re-arranged Maurice Ravel’s Trois Chansons from solo voice to the string ensemble, and a Laurie Anderson piece with spoken word fragments from an old telephone answering machine —“Is anybody home?”; “Who is this, really?” — intertwined with a Bach violin sonata. 

Perhaps because the evening started with sea shanty, each of the serenades seemed to share in the sound of the sea, with the three cellos and the stand-up bass creating deep oceanic undercurrents, while the violas and violins fluttered above them like frothy waves or sailboats swaying in the wind.

A sad series of songs, the Ravel chansons repeat the refrain, “My beloved is at war” as three beautiful birds enter with gifts — blue skies, a kiss, and finally a bleeding crimson heart. Arranged for strings without the words, this beautiful music all went by all too fast — like life.

A real bird high up in the rafters of the barn sang along. 

The centerpiece of the concert was Josef Suk’s 1892 Serenade for Strings. He was a student of Antonin Dvorak, who felt that Suk was too melancholy and urged him to compose something happy. The three cellos, superbly played by Titilayo Ayangade, Annie Hyung, and Shannon Roos, were so tuned into one another that they seemed like one deep, luxurious sound, while the bass, played by Maggie Cox, throbbed in the background like a heartbeat. The lighter strings played with passion and energy.

Lush, yearning, melodies were interspersed with moody moments of dissonance and doubt. It all came to a wild and stormy finish, as if those fleeting moments of happiness were about to come to a tragic end — as they did in real life a few years later, when Suk’s beloved young pianist wife Otilie and his mentor Dvorak both died in the same year. What began as a love song became an elegy.

The evening ended swingingly, with the full Palaver Strings ensemble swaying to Glen Miller’s silky Moonlight Serenade. After a standing ovation, guests strolled out into the moonlit meadows of David Folly’s Farm.