Before I go on, I might as well quickly finish up Friday. That evening the special guest performers were the Kronos Quartet. (David Harrington, their founder and leader, is one of the competition judges, and his colleagues came in for this.)
They played assorted excerpts on stage in conjunction with a movie about themselves projected overhead, sometimes collaborating with guest musicians who were seen (and heard) only onscreen. Meanwhile the filmmaker sat at a desk and nattered into a microphone a lot.
The music was nice, and the material on Kronos history interesting, but the big philosophical statements were pretentious asshattery.
This being done fairly quickly, this was the first evening I had a chance to go down to the conference bar after the evening programming rather than just writing my blog entry and then retiring for the night. I was hoping to catch some of the informal musicmaking, and indeed I did, hearing an assorted crew (rotating in and out between movements) including such noted names as Philip Setzer of the Emerson Quartet and Hank Dutt of Kronos in a fine scratch run through the Brahms G major Sextet. Then I went to bed.
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