I went on an errand this afternoon.  I needed to get my endpin sharpened. An endpin (called a spike in England) is the rod that protrudes from the bottom of a cello to stick in the floor so the cello doesn’t slide.  It’s a fairly recent innovation; prior to the 20th century, cellists generally didn’t use…

We had a wonderful tour of China in December.  Here are a few memorable moments, musical and cultural. Our second concert, after Shanghai, was in Xuzhou, NOT to be confused with Suzhou, pronounced “SU-joux”) famous for its rock gardens.  We had played THERE on our last trip.  Xuzhou,  (pronounced “SHoo-zo”) a city of perhaps seven million…

String Quartet in C Major  (1920) by Engelbert Humperdinck  (1854-1921) Italian Serenade (1887) by Hugo Wolf  (1860-1903) Il Tramonto (1914) by Ottorino Respighi  (1879-1936) with  Krista River, mezzo soprano   Crisantemi (1890) by  Giacomo Puccini  (1856-1924) Quartet in E Minor (1873) by Giuseppe Verdi  (1813-1901) November 12, 2011, at Duke Notes by Jonathan Bagg: It would be hard to find musical genres…