"Beethoven" is painted on a big yellow surfboard that sits on a fence Sunday mornings at 1024 Fourth Street S.W.
It's a sign for the Church of Beethoven, where cellist Felix Wurman hosts a free, nonreligious, 45-minute music and spoken word service at 10:30 a.m. every Sunday.
"It's a close second to high mass at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris," said Al Pons, who attended Sunday's service.
The Church of Beethoven isn't quite church, and there isn't much Beethoven.
Wurman likes to use a Jerry Seinfeld quote to explain.
"I don't understand why they call this product Grape Nuts," he said. "There are no grapes; there are no nuts."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The program has a theme each week. On Sunday, in front of 75 people, the theme was folk music. There was a Bob Dylan sing-along, like a church hymnal, which was preceded by a poet reciting a piece about Bob Dylan in a Dylanesque accent.
Wurman, who performs with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, played a piece with David Felberg by Zoltan Kodaly, a Hungarian composer and philosopher who played folk music. They passed around a collection plate and closed with a riveting performance of "Stars and Stripes."
It's a makeshift setup, with rows of chairs on black wooden slabs that rise up toward the back. Black curtains hang on the walls, and there's a spiderweb-type mesh cloth in front of blue and yellow lights that shine on the performers, who stand in the middle of the dimly lit room. Espresso Artists, Wurman's mobile coffee company, is set up in the corner of the room, and a girl serves espresso in little colorful cups. Behind the floor-stage, there are some tables and chairs.
Carin Holzscheiter took a break from her usual Sunday biking and hiking routine to attend the performance.
"We came from Santa Fe to hear this," she said. "It's definitely worth the trip. If it wasn't so far, we'd come every Sunday."
Felix studied the cello in Europe for 10 years after high school.
"I was also in Europe during the explosion of the early music scene, so that was very interesting," Wurman said. "All of the classical music and earlier and even on into Beethoven and Brahms was being reinterpreted from the historical point of view. They were using early instruments, trying to put things back into the way it was when the pieces were composed. But I was blending classical music and street theater."
This Sunday, they will be visited by the spirit of a funerary violinist, channeled through Felberg and his violin.
"We're going to be visited by Hieronymous Gratchenfleiss," Wurman said. "He's like the prophet of the Church of Beethoven. He's long dead. During his life, he played at funerals."
The Sunday after that, Matt Haimovitz, an Israeli-born international cello star, will expand upon his Saturday night performance at El Rey for the Church of Beethoven.
"I offered my services for his show, and he offered his," Wurman said. "He thought the Church of Beethoven sounded really cool."
He anticipates the services will grow and change as more people become involved.
"It's not a fixed," he said. "The only requirement is a high level of artistry. It's short and it's high-level. That's what we're after."
He likened planning each Sunday to putting together a dinner.
"Programming is so important - trying to find the right pieces to go together, what goes with what, what people want to hear," he said. "But the sense of it is like planning a meal. That's the best analogy. What are we going to have for the main course, the wine, the dessert? It's so important to get that right, and I think so many times it's not gotten right. The other thing is it's important that it doesn't cost anything. It's a free-will donation. We need to raise money to do this."
