Word: quartets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chamber musicians often speak of the "terrible intensity" of their lives. Top quartets can average 100 concerts a year, some 200 days on the road. Performances are not always the rarefied affairs that one might imagine. When the Juilliard was playing once at Darmstadt, Germany, a contemporary music center, the crowd found the Elliott Carter quartet so passe that they talked and jeered throughout. Robert Mann retaliated by playing with his back to the crowd. When the Concord was playing at Vassar in 1972, the group had to stop twice in a lengthy George Rochberg quartet to replace broken strings...
There are now more than 1,000 professional ensembles in America. Some 200 cities hold chamber-music series. Colleges want to have groups as residents on campus. "The young seem turned off by spectaculars," says Cellist Paul Katz of the Cleveland Quartet, which is based at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Members of the Chicago Symphony alone have formed 15 chamber ensembles...
...inescapable reason for the flowering of chamber music is economic: a top group can be engaged for around $4,500, compared with up to $15,000 a night for a diva or a virtuoso pianist. Another attraction is that the repertoire is seemingly limitless in number (hundreds of string quartets alone) and variety (duos for two, nonets for nine). The Juilliard String Quartet plays 600 works from three centuries. Other groups, like the Theater Chamber Players and the 20th Century Consort, both in Washington, D.C., focus heavily on contemporary works. Says Sergiu Luca, founder of the popular Chamber Music Northwest...
...clarinet?Tashi adds or subtracts members and friends for various pieces, which range from Schubert to contemporary Japanese Composer Toru Takemitsu. A Tashi concert is like a jam session of pros: the music sounds both spontaneous and polished. The four have recorded a superb version of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, one of the few major works written for their mix of instruments...
...Dave Gordon Quartet-- Friends of Great Black Music Loft...