New music is the best. I'm not only referring to our "fierce championing" and "ferocious advocacy" of contemporary works, which incidentally seem to be obligatory lines in all chamber ensemble bios, but also to how incredibly refreshing it is to play new stuff! Even if the new stuff is actually Haydn, written over 200 years ago. We've been on the road with the same few pieces for a couple months now, and we are so fortunate to have three awesome new works to play (in addition to Haydn!) written by three awesome friends of ours. Two of the pieces are so new, the composers (Steve Snowden and Lexi Bryant) are still changing notes in the score each time they listen to us. The third piece, entitled "Black Bend," was written by Dan Visconti and was chosen by us as the winner of Fast Forward Austin's Call for Scores. He has had some sick ensembles play his music, and now we know why. To check out more about the fabulous new music festival (FFA) that went down last weekend, head over to the Aeolus Facebook page, where Alan has posted some links for your viewing pleasure :)
But what you're really here for is pictures. Or maybe movies? But I have to figure out how to upload those first.. We've been everywhere, and we have lots to tell you! Here are the places/events which I remembered to photograph:
This is in DC. And that is Alan's suitcase, covered in a generous layer of Herbal Essences Hello Hydration shampoo. I know that is what it's called, because I use it too. And no the bottle was not mine. A fine way to kick off our DC trip, which also included a great concert on the Concordia Chamber Music Society series, but of course I didn't take any pictures of that.
Nick enjoying an entire lobster with the fabulously amazing Nancy in Boston, at Legal Seafood. Such an incredibly warm person, and a true music lover. Oh yes, we also performed a concert in Boston with the equally warm and amazing Victor Rosenbaum presiding over the piano for the Brahms F minor Quintet. Certainly don't have any pictures of that.
And then we drove up to Vermont, where there was still a foot of snow on the ground (glad I only packed sandals) and we were to stay in THE most gorgeous bed and breakfast - the Fan House.
Sara, the lovely owner of the Fan House, actually made us breakfast on this stove. Alan tries out some commonplace kitchen implements.
LOTS OF SNOW The Barnard General Store. Incredible. Also the only actual business for miles around.
And then there was the Plowman Chamber Music Competition. We were so honored and so humbled to have been chosen for the Grand Prize, a title shared with the wonderful Akropolis Reed Quintet! We are still on cloud 9 from the whole event. And still recovering from the 14 hour car ride each way. Celebratory shots of Patron - Apparently our hotel had a deal with TGIFridays? We drank for free. No better way to celebrate a competition win :)
and we miss you. Please don't take our silence personally - it's not you, it's us. We have been BUSIER than ever rehearsing, performing, plotting our future and eating airport food, and somehow our poor blog has suffered gross neglect. This humble little journal even received a shout out in a review by Luke Quinton in the Austin American Statesman, so it's about time to live up to those "nicely-curated" standards.
First things first. Our CD is out!!!!!!! Released on Longhorn Records and distributed by Naxos, this project has been a labor of love, and we are so thankful to everyone at the university and in the studio who helped make it possible. This CD would not exist without the support of Dr. Glenn Chandler or the assistance of Kathryn Hutchison. And the album art by Nathan Russell is awesome! Please go to Amazon.com and admire it.
We are also excited to announce that we will be serving as the Quartet in Residence for the 2011 Austin Chamber Music Center Workshop! This is a very special opportunity, because the four of us trace our love of chamber music and some of our fondest childhood memories back to summer chamber music camps just like this one. The chance to be mentors and role models in such a comprehensive program as the one designed by the Austin Chamber Music Center is truly an honor. We will be performing several concerts over the course of the festival, which will be added to the 'schedule' page on our website, including a program to be shared with the beloved Tokyo Quartet! Check back for more on that in the next few weeks.
Speaking of honors... we recently met and played a concert with clarinetist Håkan Rosengren in a fundraising event for his Fayetteville Chamber Music Festival. An absolutely wonderful musician and person - definitely check him out. We performed in a beautiful turn-of-the-century home in rural Fayetteville, TX for a lively and supportive audience. This event was unique also in that it marked our first performance in conjunction with the auctioning of a live longhorn calf, among many other desirable items. We have officially achieved Texan status as a quartet :)
I have new respect for people whose work requires them to stare at a computer for hours on end. To be fair, I've only really been at this for one hour max, but that's a lot for me - come on, I'm a musician! Among my assigned duties from the last Aeolus Summit (business meeting/pizza party, held most Wednesday evenings, feel free to drop by) was the task of adding all of our concerts for the 2010-2011 season to the calendar on our website. I've barely made a dent, and I'm already taking a break :( but kudos to Nick for compiling all the concert info in the first place!
I'm learning a lot about us through this process, actually. As in, that we are playing the same program 3 days in a row in Austin in November? I hope there are enough people in this city that want to hear Schumann Piano Quintet and Bartok 4! But we are playing those concerts with the fabulous pianist Rick Rowley, so that should help. I also discovered that we are spending 4 days in a hotel in Times Square for the Chamber Music America conference, and we're giving a recital there!! Through the determination, willpower, and grant-writing skills of the amazing Kathryn Hutchison, we (via UT) are the fortunate recipients of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the performance of American music. We just saw a copy of the grant proposal, and it is actually approx. 7 million pages long. This grant secured the NY performance, among others... about which I'm sure I would learn more, if I could only convince myself to finish updating this thing.
But more awesome things about the grant - we will be releasing a CD on the Longhorn label distributed by Naxos in the spring! All American works, and hopefully this recording process will be less grueling than the one we experienced last February. Although we certainly had the very best technical and moral support from our family at the Butler School of Music, which made the process that much more bearable! And thankfully that project has finally come to fruition - last week we had a 9 hour stint in the mastering studio preparing our Feb recording of Brahms c minor and Bartok 5 for release on Longhorn/Naxos at the end of October! With beautiful album artwork by the one and only Nathan Russell :)
Anyway, next time you click on one of those little black calendar boxes on our schedule page, that say basically the same thing as the full concert listing to the left, but in a possibly more visually stimulating format, please remember the sweat and tears that went into the operation. Thank you for taking the time to stop by, we love you!
(I just rediscovered this photo, I think it's from my surprise birthday party back in our Cleveland days. Obviously not much has changed in this ensemble)
So after one amazing and exhausting summer, we are back in Austin, TX! Well except for Greg, he's in Finland, but that's another story... the three of us here in the Lone Star State are enjoying our first real quartet break of the summer by seeing old friends, going to the beach (Alan), wakeboarding (me??), frantically completing quartet applications (Nick), and reminiscing about the incredible experiences we've had in the past couple months.
Our two weeks on Shelter Island, NY at the Perlman Music Program were the perfect way to wrap up the summer. Imagine your favorite childhood summer camp, including cookouts, bonfires on the beach, and pickup soccer games, and add to it an artist faculty of some of the most beloved musicians performing today. And the "campers" are all dedicated chamber musicians in their twenties/thirties. This uniquely supportive and inspiring atmosphere led to plenty of recreational late night chamber music reading with new friends and the faculty even after countless hours of rehearsal with our main groups. It also led to several more surprising collaborative endeavors - like the time Don Weilerstein schooled EVERYONE in basketball at the Perlmans' house. Which just goes to show that if you've mastered your coordination and timing enough to be the first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, everything after that is cake :) Another fond memory from the Perlmans' house would be Mr. P himself manning the computer, taking us on a guided Youtube tour of Horowitz, Kreisler, Ella Fitzgerald... and this kid -
We were lucky enough to work specifically with Itzhak Perlman and Don Weilerstein during our stay at PMP. Mr. P was exacting in what he wanted, and hilarious in the way he explained it to us. Early on he recounted the story of a cruel teacher who once belittled his student by saying, "Every day you sound worse. So why today do you sound like the day after tomorrow?" From this point forth, Mr. P endeavored to assess our progress (or lack thereof) by gleefully announcing "this sounds like next Friday" or, if we were fortunate, "that could have been yesterday." Mr. Weilerstein's description of sound production and sympathetic vibration, and the necessity of awareness of sound through our bodies (including the all-important sitbones), completely revolutionized the way we played the second movement of Beethoven 18/1. And in perhaps the best news of the summer, PMP had its own private beach. And dock. This is the other best news of the summer. The incredible Toby Perlman, who created PMP through her vision of bringing together like-minded young musicians in a safe and supportive environment. What they are keeping us safe from, I have no idea, but we love it and we're not complaining...
Ok and this is beyond the best. Merry Peckham, founder of the Chamber Music Workshop at PMP, and our mentor and inspiration from our days back in Cleveland! Another highlight of the program was a series of concerts called Tutti Suonare. For a couple hours every day in the first week, we got a break from our regular quartet members and rehearsed with groups comprised of a random mix of players, each including one faculty artist. I performed the first movement of the Dvorak piano quintet with the wonderful Roger Tapping (and Christel, Yundu, and Karen!!!)
A view of PMP from the beach. I told you it looks like summer camp...
Among the many friends we made at PMP were the fabulous Ariel Quartet. We have 3/4 of them here, I don't know where Serge is, but check them out if you ever have the chance! Also check out the Linden, Vinca, and Bryant Park Quartets. They all rock. Everything we've been hauling around since June. Packing credit to Alan.
Wow this is a long post. Thanks for reading and checking in with us :)
Many of you possibly don't know it, but Nick is the one who did 90% of the work on our webpage. If you ask him about it he'll say that it was a joint effort, but really most of it is to his credit, and I think it looks pretty good. It was the product of many, many sleepless nights on his own part in Aspen last summer, and at the end of most of those nights all he had to show for it was some empty bags of Boulder Canyon potato chips.
He slugged through it, though, and we're very happy he did. The other 10% of the webpage credit goes to me, but for the most part all I can do at this point is some updating and repair work - all that we really need a second tech-savvy person to do, I suppose. I did develop a new respect for Nick's patience with Photoshop and Dreamweaver as I tried desperately to update our homepage to reflect our temporary personnel change over the summer. Here is the fruit of my labor.
Not bad. Despite my best efforts, though, I couldn't find a way to get her head to go black and white like the rest of ours. There are a lot of fancy buttons in Photoshop, but the one very simple button I had trouble finding was the "Turn thingie black and white" button. Three months of searching just wasn't enough to find it.
I never drew up the courage to put that on the homepage of our website - in your head you get the idea that the second you do something like that, some concert presenter will log on in blatant witness to your brazen lack of professionalism.
Playing with Michelle was wonderful, but it's also very good to have you back, Nick. Do show me that button when you get a chance.
I guess it's really just a snow afternoon, but we'll take it! Our duties as the young artist quartet for Bravo have come to an end, and today marks our first day of rehearsal for baroque ensembles... and by "our" I'm referring mostly to Michelle and myself, while Alan and Greg sleep in (cello parts can't easily be doubled, and let's be honest who really wrote for viola in the 17th century??) But we just received word that the wonderful people in the Bravo office have decided to cancel all rehearsing activity this afternoon, mostly because our soloist Chee-Yun is stuck in Paris for the second time - don't fly Air France - and so here I am to post lots of pictures!
and this is actually exactly where I am right now. On the patio of Michelle's and my condo :) which we are not excited about leaving on Wednesday.
Allow me to take you on a little tour of the inside also - our rehearsal space (we don't normally share just one stand between the four of us, I'm not sure what happened here)
an outdoor performance in Leadville, hiding from the elements under our massive tent. Note the tip jar - we don't get to keep that. Also the little girl on the right felt so inclined as to conduct us for Mendelssohn and Beethoven - adorable :)
still Leadville. Mt. Elbert is behind that antique store... Alan and I took a beating there on our first hike of the season (see below)
and we're not even at the summit yet.
but now we are! And we brought Bravo with us all the way up the tallest mountain in Colorado :)
More mountain pictures, because I love mountains. Up next are the twin 14ers Grays and Torreys - not at all a necessary part of the trail, but I couldn't help it
9 AM on the summit of Grays Peak. Cowering behind a makeshift wind barrier...
pants?
freezing on top of Torreys, pointing out Grays using a borrowed sign from a heavily bundled up Japanese team. They were obviously more prepared for the weather up there than we were. When packing one suitcase for the entire summer, it comes down to concert clothes versus hiking layers. Guess which won out. But back to musical things -
around 11:30 PM in a conference room at the hotel where half of the Philadelphia Orchestra stayed. We read through a huge stack of chamber music that night, rotating players except for Alan. He was the only cellist for 3 hours... haha. I studied with Yayoi, who's peeking over Noah in the pink shirt, since I was 9!
performing in the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens. An artistic shot inside the quartet by Nate, an intern with Bravo.
Greg makes tuning a viola look good. Photo courtesy of Nate, again.
after a concert at the incredible Lodge and Spa at Cordillera, with the even more incredible Eugenia Zukerman, artistic director of Bravo. We could certainly get used to warm-up rooms that are actually private hotel suites complete with platters of fresh fruit and charcuterie - thank you Cordillera (and Bravo!) We also had the honor of performing flute quintets/quartets with Eugenia yesterday - so much fun!
Time to go hang out in the hot tub, but I'll leave you with the ever fashionable Mr. and Mrs. Luce :)
This is in DC. And that is Alan's suitcase, covered in a generous layer of Herbal Essences Hello Hydration shampoo. I know that is what it's called, because I use it too. And no the bottle was not mine. A fine way to kick off our DC trip, which also included a great concert on the Concordia Chamber Music Society series, but of course I didn't take any pictures of that.
Nick enjoying an entire lobster with the fabulously amazing Nancy in Boston, at Legal Seafood. Such an incredibly warm person, and a true music lover. Oh yes, we also performed a concert in Boston with the equally warm and amazing Victor Rosenbaum presiding over the piano for the Brahms F minor Quintet. Certainly don't have any pictures of that.
Sara, the lovely owner of the Fan House, actually made us breakfast on this stove. Alan tries out some commonplace kitchen implements.
LOTS OF SNOW
The Barnard General Store. Incredible. Also the only actual business for miles around.
Apparently our hotel had a deal with TGIFridays? We drank for free. No better way to celebrate a competition win :)
