Talk About the Passion

Original image of Anne-Marie McDermott monitoring a student’s performance at White Recital Hall by There Stands the Glass.

Music lovers within my demographic- white, male, middle-aged and Midwestern- recently commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s Murmur with rhapsodic social media posts.  I also loved Murmur.  Paying $1.02 to attend an R.E.M. concert at the Uptown Theater on May 30, 1983, still seems like the deal of a lifetime.

That said, it’s been more than 25 years since I’ve listened to Murmur.  Having fully absorbed the music in the 1980s, I’ve felt no need to revisit the album.  Expanding the horizons of my knowledge has always excited me far more than wallowing in the familiar.  Chamber music- a form that until recently was entirely foreign to me- has provided many of my kicks of late.  

Watching Anne-Marie McDermott alternately encourage and scold three young pianists at Grant Recital Hall yesterday blew my mind.  Almost everything the famed musician said in response to their performances of compositions by Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethover and Camille Saint-Saens acted as an enlightening "Catapult".

Concert Review: Escher String Quartet at Polsky Theatre

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

A distraught man seated next to me in the second row of Escher String Quartet’s recital at Polsky Theatre never stopped staring at his phone during the concert on Wednesday, August 3.  The discourteous behavior would ordinarily enrage me.

Yet prior to the performance the Chinese national explained he was communicating with friends and family in Taiwan who were closely monitoring the Chinese military drills around the contested island.

Compositions by Joseph Haydn, Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvořák sounded especially consequential as my new friend frantically doomscrolled.  Might, as he implied at intermission, the event be among the last concerts on earth?  And how precisely would I want to go out?  

I consume gobs of reggaeton for the same reason other people swallow pharmaceutical mood elevators. Yet I’d be mortified if Bad Bunny was playing when the world ended.  Escher String Quartet would provide a far more suitable sendoff.

Even though one member of the acclaimed quartet committed minor flubs during the concert presented by the Heartland Chamber Music Festival, the gorgeous Haydn, queasy Bartók and sublime Dvořák works riveted the audience of about 300.  And at only $10 a ticket, the recital was an economical end-of-the-world bargain.