Sunday afternoon, is in many ways, is the worst time to go to a chamber music concert because it interrupts my ritual Sunday afternoon nap. I don’t nap long, but that 20 minutes or so, between 4 and 5 on a Sunday afternoon is a treat I treasure. It is the perfect denouement to perfect Sunday of unwinding from the week gone-by.
But we have attended several afternoon concerts over the course of the last few weeks, and I have been amazed at the quality of the concerts and the fact that I have not even been tempted to fall asleep, even though that 4:00 to 5:00 PM time is always the most difficult hour in my day.
A few weeks ago we heard the Attacca quartet in a truly spectacular performance, which I did not write about because so much else was in an uproar in my life that I felt I would give the performers short shrift and slide into a maudlin exploration of self pity. That past, I can now say it was spectacular and will not be forgotten. Find this quartet. Listen to them. I can tell you no more.
Last week we heard Till Fellner at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon and it was another wonderful performance, not only because I am somewhat partial to solo piano music. I can be rather critical, too critical G tells me.
And today we heard the Coryo quartet up in Rhinebeck and it was another wonderful concert, part of their "Emerging Artist" series. We started with Haydn which I loved. Supposedly Schumann was to follow but we got Bartok instead. An announcement was not made, and that 4PM daze must have crept up a little bit because it took me a few measures of the first movement to get from "that is the strangest opening to a Schubert quartet I have ever heard" and "Schumann only wrote 4 string quartets, have I not heard this one before?" to realize that I was most definitely not listening to Schumann. Even then I didn’t recognize that it was the Bartok until the second movement, which could have been by no-one else. Shame on me.
The Schumann, when it appeared, was wonderful as well and the concert was quite excellent, although I felt that the Bartok was a little harsh following the Haydn and would have been better served had the Schumann remained interjected between them. I don’t know if there is any validity to this point of view, or if it is simply that I had made up my mind that I was going to hear Haydn, Schumann, and Bartok and then I couldn’t accept an alternative ordering.
Either way, perfectly nice end to the afternoon.