The SPIRITUS Festival is a series of classical chamber music concerts in Suffolk County. The festival was started last year by graduate students in music at Stony Brook University. This year, they are adding to the season by engaging young listeners with performances in schools and masterclasses for violin and piano students to learn from internationally-recognized artists.
WSHU music host Emily Boyer spoke with Artistic Director Eric Tsai about his early experiences with classical music and what it means to give back to the community.
WSHU: You started playing music when you were young?
ET: I did. Yeah, so I started the violin when I was four. My dad is a pianist, and he was always playing music around the house himself on the piano, and as well as recordings, so there was kind of always music just floating around when I was growing up, but I wanted to play the violin very badly, so my parents finally got me an instrument and started me on taking lessons when I was almost five years old.
WSHU: Do you remember how you even knew what violin was when you were four or five years old?
ET: I actually don't remember. I think the story that my parents told me was that a friend, a family friend, came over and played for us in our living room, and that's my first exposure to the violin, the sound of the instrument.
WSHU: So, did you have the opportunity then to hear classical concerts?
ET: As a kid, my dad would always take me and my siblings to the local orchestra. We would hear, you know, great soloists come in and play with the orchestra all the time, as well as just great symphonies and other orchestral works.
WSHU: It sounds like you were moved by seeing those concerts growing up, and now you're the one on stage. What does that mean to you now? Say, when you give a concert for students?
ET: I've done a lot of concerts, both in Taiwan, where I was over the pandemic, and also throughout the US. It's just amazing to see the response from the students, their faces, and when they hear music for the first time in a live setting, or when they see instruments up close and personal. That's something that I think is really, really special.
WSHU: Last year you started SPIRITUS Festival with several other graduate students in music at Stony Brook University. What inspired you?
ET: My dream for Spiritus at the beginning was that we would be able to provide world-class chamber music performances to the Three Village community during the summer season. During the summer season, I know that there is still a demand for great concerts that has not been fulfilled in the past, and so that's something that I wanted to see happen.
WSHU: And why chamber music?
ET: Chamber music is, in a sense, the heart of all music, in that it's about different voices and different roles colliding and interacting with each other to form this, this conglomerate message, different people coming together to form a unified voice, like for example, the Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht that we're performing on our last concert. I think that's just one of the most sublime and most beautiful and transcendent pieces of chamber music ever written, but at its core, it's all about this interaction between different voices on stage and with each other, and I think that's…it's what makes this so beautiful and so powerful.
WSHU: You've been hearing Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night, by Arnold Schoenberg performed by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Hear it, and more chamber music in the SPIRITUS Festival performances this weekend and next, June 5-14, in the Three Village area on Long Island. The 2026 season theme is Bon Voyage, a journey through space and time.
