Meet Blaise Dejardin of Boston Cello Quartet

Today we’d like to introduce you to Blaise Dejardin.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We are a quartet of cellists, all members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Three of us (Alexandre Lecarme, Adam Esbensen and myself) joined the BSO together in 2008 and we decided to perform a cello quartet concert with our colleague Mihail Jojatu in the summer of 2010 at Tanglewood. It was a big success with the audience and we just kept playing after that. It was too much fun to stop.

Since then, we collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma and opened for Train at Tanglewood, played the National Anthem and Metallica’s Enter Sandman at Fenway Park, appeared with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops in the James Bond Concertino, a work commissioned especially for us, and recorded two critically acclaimed albums (Pictures in 2013 and The Latin Project in 2016) as well as the soundtrack for the videogame Of Orcs and Men. We were featured in the Boston Globe, Strad Magazine, Gramophone, and Strings Magazine and we appeared recently on the TV show CBS Sunday Morning. In other words, we got to do many things that orchestra players usually don’t get to do!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has been pretty smooth for us mostly because this group is a bit like the icing on the cake in our musical career, which takes a lot of pressure off. We are already very happy with our lives as musicians in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and this group gave us a chance to play in a more intimate setting and create more personal connections among ourselves and with the audience.

The biggest struggle is to convince concert presenters who have not heard us that a cello quartet can present a very high-quality concert, even though it is four cellos and not just a regular string quartet with cello, two violins, and a viola. We are a very unique group indeed but by now we have strong relationships with many concert presenters in Massachusetts and also enjoy a very faithful following from our audience as well. We especially enjoyed connecting with the community of amateur cellists in this state, who are thrilled to see cellists who try to push the boundaries of what cellists are expected to do,

Please tell us about Boston Cello Quartet.
Our shows usually last for about an hour without intermission, presenting music ranging from classical music hits to new music that we commission from today’s young composers as well as jazz and tango music. We usually finish our shows with a medley mixing up all those styles together, which is always a hit with the audience. A lot of our music is arranged from orchestra or piano music down to four cellos, and this is something I decided to take on from the start, which gave us the opportunity to have a unique repertoire for the group.

Our group does not have a leader, we all take turns playing the leading part, which is quite unique in the world of cello quartets. We are proud of the high-quality classical music we provide to the community through our concerts and our albums and also enjoy showing the audience that because we take our work at Symphony Hall very seriously doesn’t mean we don’t know how to have fun!

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Musically, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I think we really achieved a lot of meaningful things and enriched our musical lives in ways we never dreamed of. If you had told me I would one day play with Yo-Yo Ma in a cello ensemble or play the National Anthem at Fenway Park, I would not have believed you!

Personally, I did have to learn to delegate responsibilities at some point along the way. I am very much a doer and that can have its drawbacks. There are so many things involved with running a group like ours, like managing our finances, digital and physical music distribution, writing music, social media, website, etc… it has been easier since those tasks have been a bit more evenly spread among the group.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bostoncelloquartet.com
• Email: info@bostoncelloquartet.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Boston-Cello-Quartet-130245410368766/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BostonCello4tet

Image Credit:
Kate Lemmon, Jesse Weiner, Hilary Scott , Tetsuro Hoshii

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