Playing with Friends Acclaimed quartet’s one-hour, pre-recorded program will be streamed for free on Youtube
which has been presenting Willard School in Troy board member Jennifer music series from cities taken to banding topresenting online concerts. are on the scale of a instead of what a group appearances in each of
organizations are attempting to offerings with suggested have a donation button and fundraising appeal, but what allows us to do referring to the 2017 bequest late Heinrich Medicus. the programming commitof Chamber Music board after she moved to Albany A. Laursen, who had and senior vice president eight years, the couple Emirates where he was University of Science, Research. As founding director Dhabi, Jennifer Laursen network of music conattending festivals and applied that to her programand also to launch a musicians, instrument titled Performance in Con
fellow board members to approaches for fashioning a unprecedented circumstances organization’s history of “Paying artists what concert is especially focused on rising musi
the Juilliard School, the no longer being “rising ” it has achieved the trapmanagement, recordings touring schedule. Tesla would rehearse today, five days a week. mid-march and violist
Edwin Kaplan says that the group wasn’t in the same room together again until late August. During the shutdown, they struggled to continue collaborating.
“Our goal was making some form of musical expression online. What we came up with was a meager substitute for music,” says Kaplan. As he explains it, they created pieces through overdubbing recordings of themselves. “I’d play maybe two minutes, the cellist records over that, and then the violinists on top of that.”
In a nod to their namesake, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, they named a small but ambitious commissioning series Alternating Currents. With special funding aimed at helping artists during the pandemic, 12 composers were asked to write short pieces for the
Tesla Quartet to record in their overdubbing method. The resulting video series, Quarantunes, can be viewed at teslaquartet.com.
For the Friends of Chamber Music, the Tesla has prepared an Italian journey. “Viaggio in Italia” consists of works by Italian composers (Gesualdo, Puccini and Sollima) and composers who found inspiration in Italy ( Wolf and Mozart). The Mozart is the String Quartet No. 6 in B flat major, K. 159, which he wrote while visiting Milan. As for the Puccini, it’s a rare nonvocal work, his “Crisantemi” ("Chrysanthemums").
“Stylistically it’s a diverse menu, with music ranging from the Renaissance to today, like a big Italian meal with different courses,” says Kaplan.