Join us at the Soiree

Our Spring Soiree is coming up: Thursday May 16 6-9pm, at The St. Botolph Club at 199 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. This year's theme is Night Music from the Streets of Madrid. We'll have live music from the Criers, drinks, buffet, and our ever-popular silent auction! Tickets are $125, $200 for two, and can be obtained by emailing Kelly Reed: kelly@afarcry.org A preview of our auction items:

Sponsor a Concert Help A Far Cry kick off their season in Jordan Hall by sponsoring "Once Upon a Time" on September 7 at 8PM. Hang out back stage, sit in the recording booth, and attend the dress rehearsal. Value: $20,000. Opening bid: $2,500.

An Evening of Music and Food A group of Criers will come to your home, cook dinner and play you some tunes. Invite up to four guests. One of our most popular items! Value: $3,000. Opening bid: $1,500.

Iron Chef is Back! You think the Criers can make music? Wait till you sample their cooking! Top 3 bidders will win a place at the table for you and a guest. And...you get to be the competition judge! Value: $300 per couple. Opening bid: $200.

Your Own String Quartet A quartet of Criers will play in your home. What would you do with your own personal string quartet? Value: $3,000. Opening bid: $1,500.

Catch the Vibe Bill Flynn, Artist and Professor of Art at Massachusetts College of Art, sketched A Far Cry in rehearsal. These sketches, that so wonderfully catch the spirit, energy and vibe of A Far Cry, are highlighted in our Season Seven brochure. Large charcoal sketch--Value: $800. Opening bid: $400. Small ink sketch--Value: $500. Opening bid: $250.

Kristen and Kurt Kristen Watson, featured soprano from A Far Cry's concert "Long Gaze", will reprise her performance of the wistful and provocative songs of Kurt Weill, in a special house concert setting. The lucky bidder wins an appearance from Ms. Watson and her accompanist in a customized concert of Weill and other 40s-era inspired tunes, right in the comfort of your own home. Value: $2,000. Opening bid: $1,000.

Vermont Winter Retreat Join the Criers for a special evening in Liisa Kissel's Grafton, Vermont barn for dinner and an informal concert. Package includes one night's stay at the Historic Grafton Inn and a gift certificate to Grafton Ponds Outdoor Center for a day of cross-country skiiing. Date: Tuesday, February 4. Value: $400. Opening bid: $200.

Darling Pie-of-the-Month Club Award-winning pie baker Margaret Darling, mother of award-winning violist Sarah Darling, will bake six pies for you throughout the course of the year and a Crier will deliver them to your home! Value: $250 Opening bid: $125.

Garden Clean-Up Experienced gardener Kelly Reed offers one day (4-5 hours) of spring or fall garden clean-up. Value: $250. Opening bid: $125.

Vacationing in the Virgin Islands? A Far Cry friends Jacqui and Howard Schwartz offer you a one day sailing excursion on their 44 foot ketch. Value: $200. Opening bid: $100.

Emmanuel Music Join Renowned Emmanuel Music for a concert next season in the beautiful Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street. Value of two tickets: $150. Opening bid: $75.

Summer Music in Rockport Join A Far Cry as they kick off the Rockport Chamber Music Festival at this sold-out concert on Friday, June 7 at 7:30PM. Value: $130. Opening bid: $80.

Music and Dinner with Isabella Come hear A Far Cry at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and enjoy lunch (or dinner) in Cafe G prior to the show. Sunday performances at 1:30: September 22, December 8, February 2, May 11. Thursday Avant Gardner performances at 7:30pm: December 5, April 17. Top two bids will be accepted. Value: $120. Opening bid: $75.

MFA Membership One Family Membership to the Museum of Fine Arts. Value: $200. Opening bid: $100.

ICA Membership One Family Membership to the Institute of Contemporary Art. Value: $95. Opening bid: $50.

Be Hip Crier Megumi Stohs Lewis will navigate you through the world of the hippest new music apps for your tablet or phone. Value: $100. Opening bid: $50.

More Music, Please! Take home more tunes--our Season Six Collaborators' CDs. This basket features music from David Krakauer, John McDonald, Paula Robison, Markus Schirmer, and Nicholas Urie. Value: $100. Opening bid: $25.

Our Home

We are only beginning to process yesterday's violence in Boston. Our constant prayers are with all who were affected by the attacks. We are left with so many questions and so few answers. There is so much we don't know. The one thing we do know is that we love our city and its people. Boston is AFC's home. We drive like maniacs, scream at Sox games, and spend too many hours at the pub down the street. We grew into adults at NEC, and Longy, and Harvard, and BU. Between the 18 of us, we've played in every church, synagogue, hall, gallery, theater, library, dive bar, and coat closet in this town and loved every minute of it. More importantly, we live in a city where 150 people trudged through four-foot snow drifts on foot to support us at our last community concert. This city has given us all more than we could ever dream of - a home, a life, a vibrant and open-hearted community, and a chance to make music together. It's a debt we could never hope to repay.

All the thanks we can offer is our music. We hope this will offer some humble amount of hope and healing to this community, which has been generous to us beyond measure.

What kind of cello is that? This Thursday's Avant Gardner Instrument Experiment

At this Thursday's Avant Gardner Concert, we'll be playing Francesco Geminiani's "La Folia" on a complete set of carbon fiber instruments, generously loaned to us for the month by Luis and Clark Carbon Fiber Instruments. Imagining our audience might be curious about this idea, we checked in with Jae Young Cosmos Lee, who fathered this exciting brainchild.

Q) Where did the idea come from? A) The initial idea came to me while AFC was on tour a couple of years back playing at an outdoor venue in Louisiana with 98% humidity and light rain and our musicians were freaking out... A few of the artists were very reluctant to continue playing on their precious instruments and most of our instruments sounded like they were under water.. We still finished the concert by sheer will, but the experience inspired me to look for a solution.

Q) How did you come across Luis and Clark instruments? A) Well the very first time I ever saw and heard a Luis & Clark instrument was in 2006 - the Canadian cellist, Shauna Rolston, was playing hers at Banff. Then a few years later after our concert in Louisiana, to my surprise, I found out that the company was located in the Boston area and that one of our board members already knew Luis Leguia, founder and owner of the Luis & Clark company and a former cellist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, it turned out that he had already seen A Far Cry perform, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the group. At my first meeting with Luis & his wife Stephanie, they generously loaned me a carbon fiber instrument, which I ended up playing a couple of chamber music concerts on in the fall.

Q) On a concert largely made up of music written in the past 20 years, why specifically play the one Baroque piece on the program (Geminiani's La Folia) on these new "space age" instruments? A)The title of this "Avant Gardner" program "Folly" is taken directy from the context of "La Folia", in its literal translation meaning "Madness".. What could be more "Avant-Garde" or even "Mad" than playing on a set of instruments that the 17th-century violinist and composer, Geminiani,"Il Furibondo" himself, or even Jascha Heifetz would never have imagined hearing.. Believe it or not, this is the very first time a professional ensemble would be playing on a set of carbon fiber instruments in a concert setting.. ever. I gotta say that is pretty sweet. Maybe The Guinness Book of World Records will come calling us. In all seriousness though, it seemed like the best way for us to really try these instruments was to use them to play the most "conventional" piece on a new music concert..

Q) How is it different playing a carbon fiber instrument? A) Carbon fiber responds very differently than wood and possess a completely different voice of its own without the loss of sound quality. The response time is quicker and it resonates 360 degrees around the instrument in comparison to the wooden instrument relying mainly its "f" holes as the sound output. It is virtually unbreakable & can resist the most dramatic of weather conditions.. Some people lament over the fact that its color palette is a bit more limiting than a wooden instrument, but in my opinion, one can find many different colors with judicious use of the bow. I heard a story that a couple members of the Louisiana Philharmonic who played on Luis and Clark instruments were able to retrieve their instruments in sturdy condition after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the instrument locker flooded. The only parts that had to be replaced were the bridge and soundpost, which are the only wooden parts. It really is a modern marvel.. I can imagine the experience perhaps feeling like the first time Buddy Holly plucked the strings on an electric guitar and began drooling over its distortions...

Q) Part of the inspiration for this project came from the Landfill Harmonic. Right? Can you tell us more about that? A) Back in my days when I was living out in west coast, I worked for a violin dealer for a couple of years, and was very fortunate to play on super fine, 17th and 18th century Italian instruments for clients every week. There were Strads, Guarnerius, Gaglianos, Amatis, you name it.. They were already priced in the multiple millions of dollars even back then, and I look at auction reports now a days and find that a lot of these prices have doubled and tripled.. HOW, WHY.. WHO CAN AFFORD THAT!!

Especially not me and a lot of the best musicians I know, who should be playing them. Then on the flip side of that equation, I recently watched a YouTube video of a student orchestra in the slums of Paraguay, called Landfill Harmonic. These under privileged kids play on instruments made by recycled garbage parts, but I have to say that it is one of the most inspiring videos about music I've seen in a long time, since it puts the love of music, the person's musicianship and soul before all the other things that preoccupy our business presently. There should be something in between a $20 million Stradivarius and a violin made out of a gas canister, not only that sounds great but is more affordable, because the aim of young musicians should be one of lofty goals such as creating beauty, excitement and having fun - not "When I grow up, I want to play so well, a foundation will buy me an expensive Montagnana cello!" There needs to be a equalizer in our present day, which is not that different from an electric car that forces us to move away from fossil fuel, to save our environment and economy. In a sense, I see carbon fiber instruments leading this movement for classical music as a whole, in the years to come. I want to think of them as even-ing the playing field - research into new materials might make it possible for people all over the world to experience the music we love, and we want to support that.

Patchwork Rescheduled

Saturday afternoon's concert has been moved to Sunday at 6pm, at St. John's Church in Jamaica Plain. The Gardner Museum concert has been canceled, so this is your ONE CHANCE to see this innovative and moving program!

Back in Jordan Hall Jan. 11!

After a fall of nationwide touring and our first tour to Europe (!), A Far Cry returns to Jordan Hall with "The Long Gaze" - a wide-ranging program that is a veritable hometown LOVE FEST! Tufts University composer John McDonald presents the world premiere of his newly-commissioned work. “Gentle but Uneasy Dance Music.” Benjamin Britten’s haunting “Les Illuminations” features not one but two local stars: soprano Kristen Watson and tenor Zachary Wilder. Anton Webern’s early String Quartet (1905) provides an otherworldly interlude before Kristen and Zachary return for a rocking selection of Kurt Weill songs, in new arrangements by Nicholas Urie.

A Far Cry in Jordan Hall | TICKETS January 11 2013 8pm New England Conservatory, Boston, MA

*McDonald: Gentle but Uneasy Dance Music Britten: Les Illuminations - (feat. Kristen Watson, soprano; Zachary Wilder, tenor) Webern: String Quartet (1905) Weill: Songs - (feat. Kristen Watson, soprano; Zachary Wilder, tenor)

Fiddlers Program Notes

The old fiddler

Program notes for this weekend's concert "Fiddlers" are here. Thanks, Kathryn!

Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928) :: Pelimannit (“The Fiddlers”) A work from the student days of Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, The Fiddlers is an ode to both the folk music, and also the stories of the musicians—the fiddlers—he found in a book, Album of Tunes, by Samuel Rinda-Nickola.

An ebulliently dissonant opening illustrates the arrival of the fiddlers. Kopsin Jonas, portrays the fiddler who preferred to practice out in the woods, alone. Klockar Samuel Dikström (“Bell-Ringer Samuel Dikström”) was not only a fiddler, but also an organist. Here, we find him practicing Bach. Pirun polska (“Devil's Schottische,” a dance like the polka) is both foreboding, and melancholic. Hypyt (“Jumps”) is a playful dance, brief but packed with vivacity.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) :: Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, RV 580 Vivaldi’s L'Estro Armonico (“Harmonic Inspiration”) op. 3, was one of the more influential collections of concerto form, and further elevated Vivaldi’s reputation from the music teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a home for orphaned and abandoned girls. Johann Joachim Quantz, flute instructor and court composer for Frederick II of Prussia, “The Great,” reportedly praised the set with the statement, “as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi's splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days.” Johann Sebastian Bach, an admirer of Vivaldi’s work, transcribed six of the twelve Vivaldi’s L'Estro Armonico concertos for keyboard.

The Concerto in b minor for four violins is the tenth (no. 10) of the twelve concertos (all of which are written for numbers of soloists ranging from 1, 2, or 4). The Italian Baroque concerto grosso (“big concert”) form featured in a small group of soloists (concertino) pitted against the larger ensemble (ripieno). This brilliant gem of a piece sparkles in agile, elegant strands of melody that each soloist guides, weaving in and out between each other and the ensemble like ribbons around a maypole.

Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992) :: Two Tangos (1952) Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla was born March 11 1921 to Italian parents living in Argentina. At age 3 he moved with his family to New York City where he experienced listening to all kinds of music including jazz and the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. At age 13 he acquired and began to master the bandoneón, an instrument related to the accordion (it features buttons rather than a keyboard), which is a standard, and prominent, instrument in a tango orchestra.

In the late 1930’s the Piazzollas returned to Buenos Aires. While there the pianist Artur Rubenstein suggested Ástor study music with Alberto Ginastera (who had studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood). Between going to observe orchestra rehearsals during the day and playing in tango clubs at night with his own newly formed Orquestra del 46, Piazzolla composed the score for the film Bólidos de acero (1950) a romantic comedy revolving around tango, and eventually won a grant in 1954 to study composition in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to develop his compositional style incorporating his tango background. Piazzolla recalls:

…She kept asking: “You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn't want to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that's Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) :: Romanian Folk Dances One of the greatest contributions Bartók made to the music world, besides his own array of works, was the magnitude of field recordings of traditional folk music he gathered, collected, and organized over the course of his life. His discovery of their tonal world also was reflected in the scope of his output: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in the old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”

Realizing that much of the folk music that had found its way into the Romantic music of Liszt, for example, had little to do with the original songs, Bartók set out to write simple accompaniment for the songs, altering the original tunes as little as possible. Thus, rather than dismantling them and repurposing the parts, he simply provided frames in which to showcase the content. Originally written as a work for piano in 1915, he arranged it for string orchestra in 1917.

William Walton (1902-1983) :: Sonata for Strings The Sonata for Strings was written as an expanded version of Walton’s second string quartet, at the suggestion of the conductor Sir Neville Marriner.

The work is a study in concentration and diffusion, portrayed through Walton’s unique musical language (a result of his own endless curiosity toward genre and style), which here blends lush, English pastoral sonorities with Wagnerian tension/resolution, and injects it all with sharply modern gestures. It opens like sheets of organza, billowing, aligning, entangling, sometimes transparent, other times thick with rich tonal color. Then, the reveries crystallize into a ferociously urgent journey through passion, jabbing, and angular—suddenly evaporating, disappearing like an apparition back into the opening material. The work then tumbles forward on a wave of energy over a pedal tone of anxious, obsessive staccato. Following is a melancholic third movement. Elegant, and dark, like a Black orchid, or porcelain the shade of deepest night, undulating with a force field tension of magnets held at a minor distance. It concludes in a frenetic haze out of which occasionally emerge gorgeous threads of melody pulled out from the fabric.