Let's Do the Q!

This Wednesday at noon, it will be time to make a date with the KSO's Q Series. Knoxville's newest classical venue, The Square Room, will be alive with music for the string and woodwind families. A box lunch is included in the $15 advanced purchase admission. Same-day tickets, if any, will be $20 at the door. This is a majorly affordable opportunity to see world-class chamber music come to life. Attendees should please be aware that there will be a Veterans Day parade on Gay St., which will go from 10:45 a.m. until almost showtime.

The Principal Woodwind Quintet will start the show with Anton Reicha's Quintet for Winds, Op. 88, No. 2. Reicha (pronounced to rhyme with “like a”) was a contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven, and well-known for his teaching and his treatises on composition. Among his composition students were Franck, Liszt, and Berlioz. Some of the concepts in his treatises were way ahead of their time, forecasting techniques that would not be widely used until the 20th century, such as polytonality and the use of quarter-tones. (Imagine notes existing BETWEEN the piano keys, which are ordered by half-tones or half-steps). While his theoretical work was so advanced as to be considered heretical in its time, he had the sense not to employ these techniques in his own compositions. Reicha was to the woodwind quintet repertoire what Haydn and Mozart were to the string quartet repertoire.

The Principal String Quartet will conclude the concert with Mozart's String Quartet in B♭, K. 458, “The Hunt.” The third of six quartets dedicated to his friend Franz Josef Haydn, “The Hunt” is full of jolly, equestrian swagger, excepting the Adagio third movement, which is lush and tender. Note that the subtitle of the work did not originate with Mozart, but was assigned by a group of quartet-playing hunters after they decided that the tempo of the 6/8 first movement perfectly matched their horses’ canter. (I don’t know if this is true, but hey, it sounds reasonable).

Come on out and see us!