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chamber music marathon
Jul. 5th, 2009 03:51 pmNo fireworks here last night. Got home before it was quite time for them to be taking off. Heard various pops out the window, but that was it.
Today I ventured out to the marathon final-day student concert of the Stanford chamber music institute. It only lasted 3 1/2 hours, perhaps because the intermissions were actually kept short. (And audience members who'd gone out kept filing back in during the breaks between pieces.) Fifteen groups, nine composers. (Haydn and Mendelssohn were popular this year, and so was Shostakovich.) Plus, as string players are always being exhorted to "sing," this year they were given some actual singing lessons (from choral conductor Gregory Wait), and at the start of the program the entire cast stood up and did a very nice job on a four-part Elizabethan madrigal by John Farmer.
I think that groups wanting approbation should go near the end of the program: you get more applause, whether you're better or not. However, the Weinwand Quartet, who played the first movement of Mendelssohn's Op. 13, really were as good as their applause said, and several of the others were up there too.
Best group name: four Canadians, playing a piano quartet by Fauré. So they called themselves the Four-eh Piano Quartet.
Today I ventured out to the marathon final-day student concert of the Stanford chamber music institute. It only lasted 3 1/2 hours, perhaps because the intermissions were actually kept short. (And audience members who'd gone out kept filing back in during the breaks between pieces.) Fifteen groups, nine composers. (Haydn and Mendelssohn were popular this year, and so was Shostakovich.) Plus, as string players are always being exhorted to "sing," this year they were given some actual singing lessons (from choral conductor Gregory Wait), and at the start of the program the entire cast stood up and did a very nice job on a four-part Elizabethan madrigal by John Farmer.
I think that groups wanting approbation should go near the end of the program: you get more applause, whether you're better or not. However, the Weinwand Quartet, who played the first movement of Mendelssohn's Op. 13, really were as good as their applause said, and several of the others were up there too.
Best group name: four Canadians, playing a piano quartet by Fauré. So they called themselves the Four-eh Piano Quartet.
