The Shanghai Quartet at Smith College
This evening a friend and I went to a wonderful performance by the Shanghai Quartet in Sweeney Concert Hall at Smith College.The quartet members are violinists Weigang Li and Yi-Wen Jiang, violist Honggang Li (brother of Weigang), and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras.
The program:
Joseph Haydn's Quartet in G Major, Op. 77, No. 1
You can read program notes, from a 2008 performance by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, here (pdf).
Zhou Long's "Song of the Ch'in"
Zhou Long provides some commentary on "Song of the Ch'in" here. The piece is based on "Old Fisherman", a poem by Liu Zongyuan (773-819):
The old fisherman moors at night by western cliffs;
At dawn, draws water from the clear Xiang,
lights a fire with southern bamboo.
Mists melt in the morning sun, and the man is gone;
Only the song reverberates in the green of the hills and waters.
Look back; the horizon seems to fall into the stream;
And clouds float aimlessly over the cliffs.
Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132
You can read program notes from a 2005 performance by the Orion String Quartet here.
Music in Deerfield, the concert presenter, added to the pleasure of the evening by bringing interested audience members together with the quartet and host John Montanari for an informal "Concert Conversation" an hour before the start of the performance.
Labels: Arts
posted by Karen Nelson @ 11:00 PM
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