I hope you have a wonderful Christmas – or holiday, whatever you want to call it – tomorrow.
By the way, in case any of you don’t know, I also host the blog Conversation at the Edge. In general my personal and family news goes on here and things I’d like to talk about go on there. But if there’s something personal I’d like to talk about it might go on there first 
.
The Windy City String Ensemble’s year end concert was on Friday. The first video clip below is the ending of Serenade for Strings by Tschaikovsky. Ben is concertmaster, on the left, and Esther is principal second (with the hairband, next but one along from Ben). The WCSE comprises about 30 string players, almost all in grade school or high school.
In the concert, Ben played the movement from the Brahms violin concerto he’s working on for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Youth Auditions (to play a concerto with them, not to join the orchestra) coming up in February. He’s also playing it in a competition December 30. Steve’s audio recording of the complete movement is below and the second video clip is some excerpts (stuck together).
The year end piano recital was last night. Esther played two pieces and Ben played three. The third and fourth video clips are Esther playing Humoreske by Dvorak (whole piece) and Ben playing Impromptu by MacDowell (whole piece). Continue reading »
The music accompaniment is a recording of Ben playing The Minute Waltz by Chopin.
Ben is learning Liszt’s first piano concerto. Last night he played it for the first time in a small recital (his piano teacher is accompanying him). Ben’s preparing this for a competition in 2009 so he’ll be working on it for a while. It’s going well so far.
Steve audio recorded all of it. I recorded some video clips; here’s one.
(I’ve switched to Windows encoding so you don’t need DivX to watch this. It will take a few moments to download)
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