One Month until Carnegie Hall
Hello Friends! One month from today we will be taking the stage at Zankel Hall. As we continue to prepare for our big night, we are getting more and more excited to share this music with you. Since we’re lucky to have much of the music we’re playing be by living composers, we’ve been in constant touch with many of them to make sure we’ve got it all right—via email, in person, and even over Skype! This past week alone, we had Skype meetings with both Dan Visconti and Francis Schwartz. Dan’s piece Hitchhiker’s Tales is a suite of three short and sharply contrasting movements, all rooted in the American vernacular style. The last movement, Pedal to the Metal will be performed in public for the first time on November 13. Dan has written words like “funky, aggressive, booming and powerful,” all over the score. That’s all we’re going to tell you about it until we give the premiere! Francis’s piece,Caliban’s Dance is the sequel to Cannibal Caliban and involves us channeling floating seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. We are quite certain Zankel Hall has never seen a concert like this before, and really hope that many of you can be a part of it. We are also hard at work putting the finishing touches on our upcoming CD, our first release on the Concert Artists Guild record label. It is album of ten of our favorite Radiohead songs called Everything in its Right Place. This project has been several years in the making and we are thrilled to have seen it almost to completion. Stay tuned for the release of the first single any day now!
In addition to all this hullabaloo we had a busy September. We opened our season in Southport, CT at the Music for Youth series where we played a concert and then split up to give masterclasses to young string players from the area. We were blown away by the young talent we got to work with! Connecticut’s string teachers are certainly doing something right! Next we headed to Washington, DC to perform on the Music in the Country series curated by the Washington Performing Arts Society. True to its name, this series takes place in the beautiful country homes in Virginia, with a backdrop of rolling hills and bales of hay. The venue we played in was stunning, and the audience engaging and enthusiastic! We look forward to returning to DC very soon.
The following weekend was a bit different—we headed to Miami Beach, Florida for the Performing Arts Exchange conference. There we played a juried showcase for presenters, managers etc., and did some networking at the conference with the help of our wonderful manager at CAG, Vincent Russo. It was great to be at the conference, not only for the great performance opportunity we had, but also just to check out what other people are doing in the arts and the vibrant array of acts on offer even in today’s world when many fear that the arts are being forgotten. It was such a busy weekend, in fact, we didn’t even make it to the beach!
Next up: a weeklong residency in Sun Valley, Idaho. We’ll check off another state in our quest to reach all 50!
Once again, please buy your tickets to Zankel as soon as you can—they’re going fast! We hope to bring our wonderful community of fans together, under one roof, surrounded by exhilarating music (and the occasional rumble of the R train).
Until November 13th,
Sybarite5