Moscow Soloists

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post was that on Wednesday night I saw the Moscow Soloists perform at Duke's Page Auditorium. I hadn't been paying attention and thought that they were singing soloists, so I was quite pleased to see that they were string players. They started out with a work by Beethoven, who is my favorite composer. This was followed by more modern pieces by Britten and Schnittke. While some of their techniques were interesting, modern "classical" music just isn't my cup of chai. Their final choice for the main program was Schubert, which was very pleasant. Not surprisingly, their encores were the best part. They played a short Mozart piece and followed that with another work by Schnittke that sounded to be primarily klezmer based. That was great. It was also good to see AG in his new role as Interim Director of Duke Performances, even though we'll miss him in the library.