According to violinist Joseph Maile, there will not be a string quartet performance at 4 p.m. today in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall — there will be story time.
As the weeks press on for the young instrumental virtuosos of the Music School Festival Orchestra, the music steadily grows a bit more difficult — yet the smiles and repertoire of the students grow wider.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in a tree. She made her home high in the leafy canopy for two years, refusing to leave its branches out of fear that the tree would be cut down.
When violinist David Southorn first came to Chautauqua Institution during the 2009 Season, he saw a string quartet perform in the Logan Chamber Music Series and hoped to perform in the same venue with his own string quartet one day.
Four years later, he returns to the grounds with violinist Katie Hyun, violist Wei-Yang Andy Lin and cellist Mihai Marica. The four musicians make up the Amphion String Quartet, which will perform at 4 p.m. today in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall.
Guest review by Tom Di Nardo
Tuesday evening’s Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra concert was designed as a concert of lighter music — light for us, the audience, though all four works were conceived as serious works by the composers.
It isn’t often that Marty Merkley recites rhymes in front of a packed Amphitheater, but he hopes that tonight will be one of those nights.
Merkley, Chautauqua Institution vice president and director of programming, will perform his rhyming adaptation of the narration that accompanies Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” This year marks the British composer’s 100th birthday, and Merkley said that performing Britten’s most well-known piece to mark the occasion was a no-brainer.
The horrors had begun. The “Night of Broken Glass” was Nov. 9, 1938. It was the beginning of the “Final Solution.”
In the spring of 1939, English composer and pianist Benjamin Britten traveled to Canada and then to the United States, where he remained for three years. He came up with the idea for a concerto for violin and orchestra — it was to be his Opus 15, completed that year, premiered the next and modified by the composer throughout the next two decades.
Tasmin Little has played violin on every habitable continent. If Antarctica ever becomes habitable, she would certainly consider playing for the penguins.
Audiences in some of the world’s finest concert halls have heard Little play classical violin — and so have audiences in some of the oddest venues.
Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, whose 200th birthdays are being celebrated this year, took a while to find their operatic footing. But not Benjamin Britten, who’ll be a mere 100 in November. With his first opera, Peter Grimes, Britten burst onto the scene as a master in the genre.
Jay Lesenger was a teenager when he first saw Peter Grimes at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1967.
Those who attend Saturday’s 8:15 p.m. Amphitheater performance of Benjamin Britten’s 1945 masterpiece will witness the Chautauqua Opera Company’s artistic/general director’s vision — 46 years in the making — turned into a gripping reality.
The Amphitheater, navicular in appearance, will serve as an ideal venue in which to nestle the opera’s setting: a small fishing village on England’s eastern shores.
The Chautauquan Daily 