THIRDSTREAM | Strings & Sax

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Performance at 7:30PM | Doors at 7:00PM

Suggested Donation: $25 - General Admission // $15 - Student, senior, etc.

None turned away for lack of funds, no pressure

Missing Piece, Hunter Diamond, and Sixto Franco join to present THIRDSTREAM. The collaboration is music that explores porous boundaries, or exposes limits of traditions and genres, and asks what’s possible in musical conversations.

This performance features a collaboration between Chicago and New Orleans musicians from diverse musical backgrounds as they present a large multi-movement work for chamber ensemble by Chicago sound artist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist

Diamond’s new work "Unsettling" features strings, winds, and electronics. Diamond's new work offers sound and comment on Israel from the perspective of an American Jew. He takes inspiration from contemporary Israeli writers who seek to hold Israel to account for its immense transgressions without devaluing its enormous accomplishments. In this work and in Diamond's relationship to the state of Israel, the American Jews and non-Jews of his community, and to the Jewish members of his family, one tactic has continuously proved most helpful in maintaining a sustainable position: holding contradiction.

This 2025 THIRDSTREAM project features commissions by Missing Piece from Chicago saxophonists/composers to write music for saxophone, violin, and cello. These compositions by Mai Sugimoto, Fred Jackson Jr., and Hunter Diamond explore notated sounds, spontaneous sounds, and encourage us to listen in unexpected ways. These commissions are supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. These new works premiered in Chicago in March and will be released as a studio album.

The genesis of this project is part of an ongoing collaboration between New Orleans violist and composer Sixto Franco and Chicago experimental classical violin/cello duo . The 2024 performance at venues through New Orleans featured THIRDSTREAM works by Gunther Schuller, Leroy Jenkins, Jonathan Freilich, and Sixto Franco.

Missing Piece is south side Chicago-based musical duo, violinist Dan Galat and cellist Kelly Quesada, who endeavor to commission new musical works and works from other artistic disciplines on themes that inspire others to connect with their community, care for our environment, listen deeply to ourselves and others, and speak out against injustice. Since its formation in 2022, Missing Piece has commissioned and premiered over thirty new works, including standard notation, text and graphic scores, poetry, film, ceramics, movement, and improvisation.

Hunter Diamond is a creative woodwind and sound artist based in Chicago. Though he is most at home in the improvised music scene, a mixture of conceptual, composed, and improvised performance keeps him perpetually present in the interdisciplinary Chicago creative arts community.

returns to the Marigny Opera House muiltiple times this season. Sixto Franco is a member of the Quijote Duo, Music of the Americas Project and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. A versatile performer, teacher and composer, Sixto has concertized in Europe, United States, Mexico and Uruguay. Sixto Franco is passionate about chamber music and has had the honor to perform with Eighth Black Bird, International Chamber Artists, Symbiosis Ensemble in L.A., the Kaia String Quartet, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, the Gesher Music Festival and the Missouri Chamber Music festival in St. Louis, MO, as well as joining many more artists in the New Orleans bustling scene. Sixto is also the Co-Artistic Director of the nienteForte music festival of New Orleans as well as a curator for chamber music all over the Crescent City.

is a composer/bandleader/bassist and has been active on the New Orleans scene since 1977. He has collaborated with a wide range of creative artists around the world and enjoyed “One good opportunity after another in this astounding pool of talent.”

is a cellist and guitarist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Beginning cello from the age of five in a musical family, Kyle went on to earn his Bachelors of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with renowned cellist Sharon Robinson. In 2020, Kyle earned his masters degree from Bard College. Since graduating Kyle has been an avid performer in Louisiana with groups such as Musaica, the New Orleans Chamber Orchestra, and the Viennese Operetta Ensemble. Kyle also joined the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in 2023.

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