a heroic concert

Christopher Costanza, a cellist whom I just reviewed in a different concert, and pianist Stephen Prutsman, with whom he's frequently collaborated, often with others, gave a concert tonight at Stanford of a distinctly challenging nature.

They played Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano. All five of them. They're big, hefty works. With intermission, it took 2 1/2 hours. It was in the music department's small recital hall, and like most of the concerts there, it was free. The hall was packed.

Interesting performances, too. Costanza was inquisitive and querulous. Prutsman was bold and daring and stomped over everything.

I tried an experiment at this concert. I downloaded all the scores from the IMSLP onto my ipad, to see if it was feasible to follow along. And I sat in the far back corner, so that nobody sitting behind me would be distracted. This wouldn't work with orchestral pieces, because the ipad screen at 8 inches is too small to display them clearly, but chamber music works.

And it did. My only problem was one place where I wasn't sure whether they were taking the repeat or not, and I lost my place until the end of the movement.

This is good because in a couple weeks I'm reviewing Beethoven's Op. 131 string quartet, and I really need a score for that one. Now I know I can download it, and avoid all the hassles attendant on getting a score from the library.

Preceded by a quick early dinner at home, because I'd been out in the late afternoon at another concert, an amateur strings group called Harmonia California, who played suites by three fairly obscure early 20C British composers: Frank Bridge and Granville Bantock, whom I already knew, and Christopher Wilson, whom I didn't. Bridge's, like most of his work, was mildly modernist; Bantock's was intensely Scottish; and Wilson's was kind of incipiently neoclassical. The orchestra stumbled a certain amount, but got through the pieces basically intact.