noon concerts
Jul. 2nd, 2010 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThis week is Stanford's annual chamber music seminar, which erupts into public view in the form of a few free concerts, including three noon concerts over the course of the week. Last year's were excellent; this year's, of which I attended two, were more middling.
Wednesday's featuring the Gryphon Trio in a delightfully crisp rendition of Beethoven's Archduke Trio was fine. On Friday the St. Lawrence Quartet premiered a new quartet by a Stanford grad student* - dogged neo-primitivism - and Stephen Prutsman played his own piano transcription of some overwrought progressive rock song* - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - and Prutsman was joined by Jamie Parker for Schubert's four-hand Fantasy, D. 940. The whole was an exercise in demonstrating why Schubert has lasted for 200 years.
*I'm not going to insult either of these by naming them.
Wednesday's featuring the Gryphon Trio in a delightfully crisp rendition of Beethoven's Archduke Trio was fine. On Friday the St. Lawrence Quartet premiered a new quartet by a Stanford grad student* - dogged neo-primitivism - and Stephen Prutsman played his own piano transcription of some overwrought progressive rock song* - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - and Prutsman was joined by Jamie Parker for Schubert's four-hand Fantasy, D. 940. The whole was an exercise in demonstrating why Schubert has lasted for 200 years.
*I'm not going to insult either of these by naming them.
