music of a week

[calimac]

It was Stanford's annual Chamber Music Seminar last week, so I got to hear a lot of good free chamber music. The instructors of the seminar - the St. Lawrence String Quartet (Stanford's resident ensemble), pianists Jamie Parker and Stephen Prutsman, clarinettist Todd Palmer, a couple others - gave three free lunchtime concerts, with nice performances of Schumann's Piano Quintet, Mendelssohn's Op. 66 piano trio, some Dvorak Slavonic Dances for piano four-hands, Debussy's Rhapsody for clarinet and piano, and a sizzlingly good version of Brahms' Op. 25 piano quartet - one of those performances that I made up my mind to give a standing ovation to long before it was over.

Sunday was the four-hour marathon concert by all the student ensembles. These were, I guess, pre-formed groups that applied for studentship: some of the ensembles were all local senior citizens; some were all Canadians, all Colombians, all Google engineers, or a mixture of Stanford grad students and Stanford-affiliated physicians. Lots of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Shostakovich; one venture into Bartok's Sixth Quartet; one clarinet trio by Alexander von Zemlinsky. Shostakovich's short, obscure early Op. 8 piano trio, from a group calling itself the Polaris Trio, was a highlight; a quartet called Shonogan jumped energetically through a movement of Schumann's Op. 41 No. 3 quartet. In general, the less well I knew the music, the better I liked the performance.

The performers felt relaxed enough to write amusing biographies for the program handout:

Aleksandra Labinska is a well-known and critically-acclaimed violinist in the Toronto area, and was recently reviewed in numerous publications.
"Not as bad as I was expecting!" - Anonymous, The Toronto Star
"She doesn't completely suck, I guess." - Anonymous, Whole Note Magazine
"You're starting to sound better these days...now get out, I need to clean this room." - Cesar, University of Toronto custodian.

Carolyn Raines (violin):
There was a young lady named "C,"
Who was asked what she wanted to be.
She replied with a grin,
"Why I'll play violin."
But somehow she became an attorney.

To attend this, I skipped out of most of Sunday at Westercon, and I think I had a better time. And on Saturday I delayed my arrival at the con by detouring up to Daly City to hear a different type of music-making: divertimento conducted the concert band he belongs to, the Daly City All-Stars Band. Just a group of amateur enthusiasts in a dining hall, but it was fun, and there were some genuine felicities - the transition into the second theme and part of the climax of the abridged Brahms that jumped around from place to place within the movement, and the well-arranged Woody Herman medley.

I'll write more about Westercon when I have something to say. Music be the food of love; play on!

Comments

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for coming to hear the band concert in Daly City. I though you might enjoy the symphony excerpts, even though they were sandwiched between a jazz-oriented second half of the concert and about 20 minutes of selections from an opera on the other side. I know you've said neither of those musical genres are favorites for you.