Monday, August 18, 2008

Summit Recap Post 5 - Matt Haimovitz Concert - Happy 100th Elliot Carter!

This was an absolutely amazing concert ...

First of all, he started with the Brahms F Maj. which he had taught in the masterclass earlier that day...

Next, he played Elliot Carter's Cello Sonata (written in 1948). He spoke about how it was written for Bernie Greenhouse & the pianist also chimed in here & there... it's an incredibly cool piece, and very, very suited to Matt's playing - he's great w/ all this "new music"

After that was Dankner's Klezmer Fantasy, which was just written last year (that's fucking cool!) & was this awesome collection of Jewish music ... if I got it right, the pianist was actually improvising most of his part, since the original version actually involved orchestra... or something like that..

Then he did Barber's C minor sonata (op. 6), which again was equally as cool ... the whole concert just had this amazing energy to it ... it was really on the level of rock concerts in a lot of ways (in terms of how much I was into it/the emotional high I got from it) ... it turns out that the pianist was a friend of Geoff Kidde's (he's one of my teachers at school), so that was pretty neat ... I'm gonna get in touch w/ him soon ... he teaches at Princeton & Hunter ...

Also, I passed on The Cellist of Sarajevo to Matt, along w/ Jen Castellano's piece "It Takes Two" & some compositions by Itamar Danziger - hopefully he'll be into some of them ...

Really just such an amazing night ... and I picked up two of Matt's cds, which was exciting - I haven't listened to too much of them just yet (b/c most of my music listening time was while driving, and it was all about blasting metallica!!)

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Still to come:
Mendelssohn Octet
Trout Quintet
End of Festival Performances & Thoughts on Orchestra
People!!

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