Saturday evening I went to the Bing Studio, the little room in the basement of Stanford's concert hall, for a concert by the Telegraph Quartet. I was there to review them. They were playing modern music by three early-to-mid 20th century B's: Berg, Britten, and Bacewicz. All right, it wasn't all that difficult music - even the Berg, which is (mostly, effectively all) serialist, was not that hard to listen to, the Bacewicz is charming when played well, and the Britten is weird and fascinating - and they played it very well, as I acknowledged in my review. It was an enlightening and enriching experience, truly.
Yet the reason it was tucked away in the basement is that the main auditorium had been reserved by the Music Department for the quarterly concert by the student orchestra. The music from it was piped out to monitors in the lobby. At our concert's intermission, they were playing Ravel's Ma Mère L'oye, and when the string quartet concert was over, the orchestra was playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. And y'know, I would rather have been there.
No comments:
Post a Comment