PCMS’s annual collaboration with ECCO features seventeen leading soloists and chamber musicians of today’s younger generation (many of whom are principals in major American orchestras as well as leaders of internationally renowned quartets). This “exciting, conductor-less band of strings” (New Yorker) combines the power and expansiveness of a great orchestral ensemble with the personal involvement and spontaneity of chamber music. Of note on this program is Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings, which marries the style of the Baroque concerto grosso to Hungarian folksong melodies. Written in 1939, its sunny disposition does not reflect the troubled political context of its composition; the piece was written two weeks before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, which signaled the beginning of World War II.