Spring Chamber Music Postscript

I don’t usually do it this way, but I am reporting about a concert that has already happened. A concert as momentous as Sunday’s requires a lot of preparation, and I am not always able to just whip off a blog post the way I sometimes am. The Knoxville Marathon was Sunday, and we were warned that parking might be a problem because runners would still be finishing up on Gay Street, where our patrons and we would be arriving for the Chamber Classics concert at 2:30. It was ironic then, that after the concert I would end up feeling like I had just run a marathon- a chamber music marathon. Chamber music playing, especially quartet playing, is more like performing opera than anything else I do, except for maybe solo recital and concerto playing. Individual parts for all of the works we played on Sunday more resemble an opera role. You study the role, put it together with the other “roles” that fellow quartet players are learning, then put the roles together to create a “mini-opera without words.” This was most especially true for the Beethoven and Debussy quartets, but Lucas’ pieces and the Borodin quartet also had no small amount of character realization that had to be done.

As postscript to the Bijou concert, the Principal Quartet played at the Lucas Richman Society’s annual dinner for donors at Fleming’s Steak House in Turkey Creek. Core violinist Sara Matayoshi was the strolling violinist during dinner, and the quartet played a small segment during dessert, that was interlaced with videos from Maestro Richman’s files. We all learned a lot last night; for one, that Lucas appeared in a Jerry Lewis film entitled Smorgasbord, in an “orchestra crowd scene” that featured Mr. Lewis as a conductor (in this case in front of the LA Youth Orchestra) and Lucas as a second violinist. Another clip showed Lucas as a contestant on (are you sitting down?) Wheel of Fortune. He allowed that although he didn’t win, he did come away with $250 worth of appliances from Service Merchandise! We performed the Scherzo from the Borodin quartet (which we had played earlier) and a work by Lucas entitled Gerhardt Variations, part of the score for a film entitled Four Faces which his dad, actor Peter Mark Richman, created but never released. We viewed a passage from the film and found it to be very powerful; if you know the elder Richman’s work on The Twilight Zone, The FBI, or one of a slew of shows he had roles in, then you know what I’m talking about. As a child, Lucas would go to see his dad at work at the studios. Since Peter Mark was often portraying a bad guy, Lucas stated that as a child he “saw his dad get killed a lot.”

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It came as somewhat of a surprise to me to learn that concerts are being rebroadcast on WUOT-FM about a month after their live dates. Here is schedule for the remainder of the season, but I want to insist that, indeed, live music is best.

April Chamber
This concert will air on WUOT on Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. This concert will be rebroadcast on Monday, September 2, 2013 at 8:00 p.m.

April Masterworks
This concert will air on WUOT on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. This concert will be rebroadcast on Monday, September 9, 2013 at 8:00 p.m.

May Chamber
This concert will air on WUOT on Tuesday, June 4, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. This concert will be rebroadcast on Monday, September 16, 2013 at 8:00 p.m.

May Masterworks
This concert will air on WUOT on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. This concert will be rebroadcast on Monday, September 23, 2013 at 8:00 p.m.