(with candles where permitted)

I erred below. It is the distinguished Borodin String Quartet which will be performing Beethoven's Grosse Fuge -- this Wednesday at the Library of Congress -- and not the Takacs String Quartet -- which will be performing, instead, Beethoven's String Quartet in E flat Major Opus 127 (1824) this coming Sunday at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.

As always, the National Gallery of Art's fine program notes are available in advance at:

http://www.nga.gov/programs/pdf/mscoct23-05.pdf

The concluding paragraph of the program notes that other guest String Quartets at the NGA, in 2005-2006, will be the Pacifica, Auryn, Kronos, Kiujken, Eusia, and the NGA. Since these concerts are free, this year will provide the opportunity to study an overview of the riches of the Western String Quartet literature for the cost of round trip bus or Metro fare -- or free for walkers.

(My title to this post is from Bob Shingleton's [On an Overgrown Path] discussion with the members of the Borodin String Quartet of the order in which they perform their cycle of Shostakovich string quartets. They try to perform the last three great Shostakovich string quartets -- 14,13, and 15 -- "with candles...")

http://theovergrownpath.blogspot.com/2005/10/recycling-shostakovich-and-beethoven.html#comments

*

N. and I attended the NSO performance of Berg's Violin Concerto last Thursday, and the Vermeer String Quartet performance of Haydn and Janacek ["Intimate Letters"], at the Library of Congress, on Friday evening (after attending a screening of "Everything is Illuminated"). On Saturday and Sunday evenings, we watched, on DVD, Valery Gergiev lead the Petersburg Mariinsky (Kirov) Opera Company in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila -- a 1995 coproduction with the San Francisco Opera.











Paper hot air balloons, powered by candles, in Chiang Mai, Thailand.