Sturgis played Schoenberg 1st quartet at the Clinton Library last Tuesday...the performance wen't reasonably well, although it was definitely far from perfect. We had put tons and tons of work into it, rehearsing for four hours almost every day for two weeks. Its a beast of a piece, by far one of the hardest quartets I have ever played (Schoenberg 4, Pearle, and Plylar are all among the hard ones). The audience seemed to like it as well, they aren't used to hearing music like that as it isn't usually performed around these parts. But we didn't lose too many people, and they seemed pretty excited about it.
ASO played Mahler 2 this past weekend...I had never played the piece before, and had to do bowings from a completely blank part...so, needless to say, I kept changing everything during rehearsal. Oops. One of our cellists had to drop out at the last second, meaning we performed the concert with only 7 cellos...Mahler writes "as many strings as possible" in the score...I guess in Arkansas, seven is the max.
My parents were in town for both concerts...we dined at Loca Luna, Capital Bar and Grill, Flying Fish, Juanitas, and the River Market. They seemed to have a good time and enjoyed the concerts, even if a hike up Pinnacle Mountain turned out to be a very bad idea. Oh well...
