Most of the time, conductor Jaime Laredo lets cellist Sharon Robinson decide how the music she plays will sound.
“I better, or else I get it,” Laredo said with a laugh.
Harvey Fineberg thinks the Affordable Care Act is a significant step in the right direction of health care reform, but he feels it doesn’t do enough to address the need for better care at an affordable cost.
Fineberg serves as president of the Institute of Medicine, an independent organization that provides unbiased advice on issues in biomedical science, medicine and health. He will speak at today’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture in the Amphitheater on three issues he feels the United States must address to create a “culture of health.”
Pianist Roberto Plano looks for something beyond perfection when he plays music.
He believes that every musician must strive to balance technical mastery with musical expression. A musician who is technically perfect but doesn’t have an artistic message is less musical than a musician who can play with emotion and vitality despite his or her mistakes, he said.
When people tell Richard Kaufman they want to be a film composer, he wants to know their favorite film score. Then he wants to know their favorite film score from the 1930s and 1940s, “the era of the greatest film composers who ever lived.”
Kaufman said the early years of film scoring was an era of the greats. Understanding where film scores come from and what they can do is vital for anyone hoping to write their own score.
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.
At 12:15 p.m. Sunday during the Crafts Alliance craft show on Bestor Plaza, the players of the Thursday Morning Brass will perform in front of the Colonnade. Their mission is to raise money for a scholarship fund that helps students in the Music School Festival Orchestra.
Three Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra members will discuss the various aspects of practicing and why it is an important part of a musician’s development during the last Symphony Partners Brown Bag lecture of the 2013 Season at 12:15 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall.
For Laurence Roman, composing music is “a little like playing … chess on a skateboard on an icy slope.”
Melodies, rhythm, thematic development, musical texture, orchestral colors, tonality and formal structure — all of these elements must be balanced for a piece to be successful. Roman said there are times when he’s saturated with a musical problem and needs 400 cups of coffee to keep going. In those moments, he remembers to take a break from his work.
The chilly evening air and half-empty wooden pews of the Amphitheater may have dampened the spirits of patrons Monday night during Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, performed by students from the School of Music’s Voice Program and the Music School Festival Orchestra. The performers, though, couldn’t have asked for a better environment for the hauntingly austere production.
Nobody asked Milana Strezeva, a renowned Moldovan-American pianist, if she wanted to learn to play piano. Her parents invited a music teacher to look at Strezeva’s hands and her fate was pronounced: She had very good hands for the instrument.
Lessons began at age 6, and by 11, Strezeva was accompanying her father, a clarinetist, and her mother, a soprano vocalist, in concert. This was her first chamber music ensemble. Luckily, Strezeva turned out to love chamber music.
The Chautauquan Daily 