Well here’s today’s installment of classical music from the Savannah Music Festival, which is being featured all week on NPR Music: Savannah Music Festival’s Russian Reminiscence
The program airing today (you can listen at the above link) was recorded at the Telfair Academy on March 28th.
It’s a 62-minute performance of Anton Arensky: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 35 and Tchaikovsky: Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70 (for string sextet).
The performers include:
Daniel Hope, violin
Philip Dukes, viola
and the following from the Arensky ensemble:
Benny Kim, violin
Josephine Knight, cello
Keith Robinson, cello
Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola
From NPR’s description:
In this program, Hope and his handpicked group of players begin with a musical memorial to Tchaikovsky and close with music by the master himself. When Tchaikovsky died in 1893 at age 53, he left more than a few young Russian composers devastated. Sergei Rachmaninov responded with a brooding, elegiac piano trio dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s memory. Anton Arensky went one step further in his Second String Quartet, borrowing one of Tchaikovsky’s best-loved melodies (from the song “Legend”) to serve as the emotional heart of the piece. There’s a palpable air of solemnity in Arensky’s music, written for the non-traditional ensemble of violin, viola and two cellos. Arensky later revamped his three-movement piece by extracting the central movement, a set of variations on Tchaikovsky’s song, and beefing it up into a stand-alone piece for string orchestra.
Go to the link to listen and to read more. As I keep noting, this is amazing PR for the entire city.