Did you miss the Oscar-nominated "God of Love" by Delaware-bred Luke Matheny at the Film Brothers' Festival of Shorts last October? Here's your last chance before the Academy Awards to see it on the big screen! Theatre N will show all of the Short Film (Live Action) 2011 Oscar nominees tonight (Friday, February 18) at 8:00 PM, tomorrow (Saturday, February 19) at 5:00 PM and Sunday (February 20) at noon.
In addition to "God of Love," you'll see the other nominated films: "The Confession" by Tanel Toom (UK), "The Crush" by Michael Creaugh (Ireland), "Na Wewe" by Ivan Goldschmidt (Belgium) and "Wish 143" by Ian Barnes and Samantha Waite (UK).
Tickets are $7, or $5 for the Sunday Matinee.
For information on purchasing "God of Love" on DVD, click here.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Serafin String Quartet: Grace and Passion
Dissonance has become a relative concept in classical music-with the works of composers such as Schönberg and Schnittke changing the landscape and pushing the audience’s ear to accept challenging, sometimes harsh “chords” or clusters. The opening notes of W.A. Mozart’s String Quartet in C Major, K. 465 create a dissonance that might have been challenging in that same way to listeners in the eighteenth century. But to our modern ears, the quartet is elegant, at times passionate, yet well within our aural “vocabulary”. The Serafin String Quartet opened their concert-part of the Calvary Community Series-with this lovely piece. The quartet members are Kate Ransom and Timothy Schwarz, violins, Ana Tsinadze, viola and Lawrence Stomberg, ‘cello. (During her maternity leave, Ms. Tsinadze is replaced by Luke Fleming of the Attacca Quartet.)
Grant Youngblood sang Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach (written for voice and string quartet). His warm, even tone and excellent diction beautifully conveyed the music and the text. The poem, by Matthew Arnold, was brought to life by the quartet, whose music ebbs, flows and crashes like waves on the beach. Though the poem is English, we mustn’t forget Barber grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was one of the first graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music. How fortunate were we to be able to hear Mr. Youngblood in one of his rare local performances!
The Quartet played Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13. with gusto. Mendelssohn wastes no time, diving immediately into the brooding angst of the piece. The second movement is reflective and calmer than the first. It almost seems an explanation of the raw emotions that have been exposed. In the third movement, the gypsy-like motive lends some lightness to the quartet, but by the fourth movement, the original theme returns. After several deceptive cadences, Mendelssohn builds the tension until the very end. I was astounded to learn Mendelssohn had only been seventeen when he composed this quartet. He was in good, youthful company with the other composers featured in this wonderful concert: Barber was thirty-one when he composed Dover Beach and Mozart was twenty-nine when he completed his quartet in C major, K 465. Be sure to hear the Serafin String Quartet’s next performance on March 10 at 12:30 pm at First & Central Presbyterian Church in Wilmington!
For more information about the Calvary Community Series:
http://www.calvaryhillcrest.org/calvaryCommunitySeries.htm
For more information about the Serafin String Quartet:
http://www.serafinquartet.org/
Monday, February 14, 2011
David Kim and Marian Lee play Brahms
Artistic director Xiang Gao has not only put Delaware on the map with his own violin performances, but he has brought great musicians to the UD campus. The Master Players Concert Series and the Delaware Korean American Association sponsored the February 13 piano and violin recital by David Kim, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Marian Lee, faculty pianist at the University of Delaware and former Julliard classmate of Mr. Kim.
The two musicians are both so good that not only were they able to play the second movement of the F.A.E. Sonata Scherzo (Brahms’ contribution to a multi-composer work written as a tribute to the violinist Joseph Joachim), but they were also able to master the dynamic levels so that each phrase blossomed like a firecracker fountain then yielded to the next phrase so that it was truly a performance of two equal partners – just as Brahms would have wanted.
Dr. Lee gave a pristine performance of the Intermezzo Opus 118, No. 2 in A Major. She brought out the intricate balance of the middle voice and delicately wound the upper melody around it without crowding either line. Her clean playing made the effect of the piece dramatic in its purity.
The two violin sonatas which followed each had that magic that is made up of so many little details that master musicians can pull off without schmaltz or excess. In the Sonata in A Major, Opus 100, there were almost imperceptible hesitations before the most dramatic notes which were so smoothly coordinated that this just had to come from feeling the music rather than a learned gesture.
And the performance of the Sonata in D Minor, Opus 108 showed again how easily the balance of sound was achieved so that even with the busiest parts and an open lid on a grand piano, the piano never hid the violin, even when Mr. Kim played in the very lowest range of the violin. His tone is consistently smooth and beautiful and he found a very good collaborator in Marian Lee.
See www.music.udel.edu
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