a little concert

Each academic term - or at least most of them - the Stanford Music Dept. hosts a set of 2 or 3 concerts they call the Chamber Music Showcase. Ensembles of student musicians play a movement each from various works of the chamber repertoire. There's usually at least a dozen groups of 2 to 5 performers, mostly strings and piano with the occasional wind.

These concerts are hosted by the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, whose job as the resident ensemble includes being among the coaches who teach the students. One or another of the quartet members will introduce each concert, and collectively they do the gruntwork of setting up the chairs and music stands, occasionally sit in as performers, and apologize when a set of players is late in showing up.

Geoff Nuttall, first violinist of the St. Lawrence, died a couple months ago. The Quartet's immediately upcoming concert was cancelled, and their next one - in January - has been transformed into a memoriam for Geoff. I'm surely going to go. But the Chamber Music Showcase is going on, and last Wednesday I showed up at the tiny Campbell Hall to find the three remaining members of the Quartet huddled and conferring, down in the corner by the stage door.

And the show went on. The second concert was Monday evening. Unusual this time was the absence of anything from the classical period. Most of the pieces were late 19th century, and a few early 20C ones were either holdovers (Faure, early Rachmaninoff) or conservatives (Martinu, Shostakovich). The most unusual offering was Mahler's fragmentary juvenile Piano Quartet, which I've heard in concert before. Best ;performance was of the first movement from the Brahms Op. 25 quartet.