Monday, August 9, 2010

The Haydn Project

We started our Haydn project tonight - we're going to play all of the Haydn quartets.  There are an awful lot of them - I think the official number is 83, although on the web you can find folks that will say there are 68, and others that will say more than 90 (that's kind of cheating, don't you think?  Let's be specific, shall we?).  We're playing off of the Peters Edition, which has the quartets divided into four volumes.  The first two volumes have the 30 famous (berühmte) quartets, and the last two have the remaining 53 in our official count.

The first one in the book was Opus 17 number 5 - it's a nice little quartet (it's short - the cello part is only 3 pages for the whole quartet!), but it definitely has some funny little musical twists that can catch you if you're not paying attention.

We play again in September!

82 More Haydns to Play on the Wall.....


Well, I guess I'll be the first to post on the new WASHINGTON Da Capo Quartet blog. We learned tonight that we have competition. Who knew there was another Da Capo Quartet.....who sound a bit more accomplished than we? But we were a fully-formed quartet BEFORE that Da Capo Quartet was (we think). So we are pondering a lawsuit. But we may just change our name to the Washington Da Capo Quartet. Washington DC Quartet. Or, because of our love of Shostakovich, the Washington Da Capo Qbabtet.

Anyway, for some background, we are a bunch of teachers (2 former, 2 current). I (David, Violin II) teach Government in Silver Spring, MD, Jessica (Cello) teaches World History in Fairfax County, VA, Valerie (Violin I) taught English in Silver Spring, MD and now dabbles in college near Baltimore. And Del (Viola) taught EVERYthing a long time ago (mostly in Philadelphia). We've been playing together as a group for.....I don't know.....8 years? Did we start in 2002? Correct me, please... We leaving qbabtetting together. We laugh, we cry, stumble, we persevere, we clear our heads. It's great fun. Perhaps our greatest asset is Del's qbabtet library. He owns EVERYthing, which is awesome. For an amateur quartet, we've sure played a whole lot of quartets.

We made a recent pact to play ALL of the Haydn string quartets, hence my blog post title. One down (the first.....actually NOT his first, but the first in the first book of Beruehmtes....and it was kind of fun and not so easy, especially for Violin I) and only 82 more to go (I think).

We also played Bartok #1 (Jessica, correct me if I'm wrong) for the 3rd or 4th time and it started actually coming together (in parts). We enjoy it a little more each time! I have an atonal little ditty stuck in my head right now, in fact.

More soon....

David