Monday, September 25, 2006

Liquids Allowed Again...

Well, in limited amounts, anyhow. The TSA announced that effective today, it has adjusted tha ban on liquids, aerosols and gels. Yay! Hooray! As silly as it seems, Julie and Emily can both confirm that I am incredibly attached to my favourite brands of toiletries. As long as I can keep the amount under the control, I won't have to check my suitcase! I am extremely happy about this. The TSA website says that as long as travel-sized toiletries (under 3 ounces each) will fit into one quart-sized, clear plastic zip-lock bag, they will be allowed as carry-on.


Go to TSA's website here.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Shostakovich's birthday - September 25!


Dmitri Shostakovich would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Monday! In honor of the occasion, we will be doing a live radio interview on WKCR in New York - 89.9 FM or streaming live on the web at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/

Tune in at 2:15pm to celebrate Shostakovich's birthday with us!

Friday, September 15, 2006

Podcasts!

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston announced in a recent press release that it is launching free classical music podcasts on their website! This is very exciting news as this program features unreleased live performances from their concert series. So, of course, I am also promoting this as we are one of the featured artists on their podcasts! Ah, the joys of self-promotion. In seriousness, though, I think this is a wonderful thing for not only us artists but also for the fans and listeners out there. It can be very difficult to find classical music recordings , especially of live performances, but through the Internet, they can be readily available worldwide.

The actual press release from the Gardner Museum's website can be found here.

You can find our performance of Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio in the episode labeled "Concert 1".

I hope you enjoy the podcasts and please share this news with your friends!




Monday, September 11, 2006

Beethoven Cycle!


Yesterday we played the final concert in our Beethoven piano trio cycle at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. The cycle has taken us most of a year to play (we gave two other concerts in January and March) and it has been a wonderful adventure. Beethoven's piano trios span most of his compositional life; the set of Op. 1 trios were the first works he published, the Op. 70s are from the middle of his career, and the "Archduke" trio and "Kakadu" variations come from near the end (not quite as late as the final quartets unfortunately...if only we had an Op. 136 trio!) I am so glad we had the opportunity to play all of these works this year, and also very happy that we'll keep playing them many times in the years to come ;-)

Here's a picture of Em and Donna with violist and music impresario, Scott Nickrenz, who runs the Gardner museum series.




After the concert, my parents threw an awesome party at their home in Cambridge (this has become something of a tradition after our performances in the area). My mother is an AMAZING cook and she made an astonishing amount of totally delicious food including about 20 different dishes and 7 pies for dessert!
This was mostly a solo effort, although my sister Amanda assisted during the last week and baked an amazing cake. And the Claremonters (plus two boyfriends and a husband who came along on the trip) helped with the last-minute preparation!

Here's a picture of the whole gang of us: from left to right - Donna, Kai Yu, Emily, Chad, Julie, Aaron, Amanda!