Performers

BOYD MEET GIRL

RUPERT BOYD, guitar
LAURA METCALF, cello

Back at Screen Door Festival by popular demand, Australian guitarist Rupert Boyd, and American cellist Laura Metcalf perform a repertoire ranging from Bach to Beyoncé. Both acclaimed soloists, Rupert has been described as "truly evocative" by The Washington Post, and Laura has been called "brilliant" by Gramophone. In 2017, Boyd Meets Girl released its debut album Boyd Meets Girl, which reached #3 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Albums chart, and has received over 750,000 streams on Spotify. Their Screen Door performance features their signature mix of musical styles, genres, and moods. A highly engaging duo, Boyd Meets Girl promises an evening of pure musical delight.

Tickets: Age 35+: $38 | 22-34: $20 | 21 & Under: Pay What You Wish.

Honorary Concert Sponsors: Mazie Cox and Brinkley Thorne

Q&A WITH BOYD MEETS GIRL

In their first rehearsal together, Rupert Boyd and Laura Metcalf of Boyd Meets Girl weren't sure what to play.

"What we quickly discovered is that there is very little repertoire written for cello and guitar. At first seemed like a bit of a stumbling block," Rupert says, "but where there’s a will there’s a way, and we soon found that the combination of cello and guitar is very open to a wide variety of repertoire. With the guitar’s polyphonic capabilities, and the 'singing' nature of the cello, it’s fairly straight-forward to make various songs work for our instrumentation, whether that be a Schubert lieder or a Beatles song."

In a reverse on the classic musical love story, Rupert and Laura began dating before they played music together. They formed the duo for fun, so they could spend more time together. But quickly, as they began playing everything from Bach to Beyoncé, the duo took off in popularity.

"What was at first just a side project for each of us has now become a large focus of our professional lives, including hundreds and hundreds of concerts over three continents, and two commercially released albums, which have received over 5 million streams on Spotify alone. And personally, we have now been married for almost 10 years and have a 6-year-old son," Rupert says.

Boyd Meets Girl plays Screen Door Festival on Friday, August 14 at 8 pm. The duo will also play in the Screen Door Festival Opening Concert on Thursday, August 13 at 5:30 and the Screen Door Festival Finale.

Cello and guitar duos are not common. Tell us what works about this particular instrumental combination?

When the guitar plays with higher-pitched instruments like flute or violin, it’s rare that it works for the guitar, but with the cello we can both take turns switching between playing the melody and accompaniment, which opens up a lot of possibilities. We’ve really relished exploring over the years what we can make work on cello and guitar.

How do you choose your mix of musical pieces?

We really just enjoy playing pieces that we love. We are both classically trained, with many degrees in classical music performance between us, and so do love to play music by the great classical composers like Bach, Boccherini, Ravel, Debussy, etc. We also love playing popular music by artists like Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Radiohead, etc. When a piece of music is a great piece, it doesn’t feel at all strange to us to put these works side by side on the same program.

How do Bach and Beyoncé compliment each other?

When we play a piece by Bach, we are bringing to life black dots on a page that were written some 300 years ago yet are still able to express all the same emotions that we experience in modern life. It’s that human connection between ourselves and composers living in a very different time and place that can be one of the most satisfying aspects of performing and listening to classical music. With Beyoncé, on the other hand, instead of learning these pieces by looking at sheet music, we can easily find videos and recordings of her performing her songs, and so that emotional connection between composer and audience is not at all veiled by the passage of time. But when the music is played on two classical instruments, Bach and Beyoncé’s music side by side can be seen as they are: great pieces of music that are equally relevant, and emotionally impactful in this current day and age.