The Stanford Chamber Strings (members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, students, and uh... an alumnus) held their debut concert tonight in Campbell Recital Hall, on Stanford campus. Many of the players performed in last year's Holiday Musicale as well. Below you can find MP3s of us playing and some photos of the concert and celebration afterwards. Surprisingly, the hall was full! It's dead week on Stanford campus, and we thought that students would be too stressed out to show up.

Everything went (more or less) smoothly, except that the Stanford Music Department charged admission (!), which is ridiculous for a student ensemble performance. I don't know what they're thinking -- they get one strike in my book. When they get to three strikes, um... I'll think bad thoughts at them or something. :) I realized that it was going to be an idle threat as I was typing it. heh... Anyway, the other annoyance of the evening was a very anal woman who was manning the door. She wouldn't let late people into the hall, even in between movements. As a result, two of my friends (and one of our coaches) missed my quartet's performance.

Unfortunately, the thing you will notice about the recording below is that it's not clean. It sounds clipped and metallic. I think I messed up somewhere, because it sounds fine when played from the mini-dv tape. I'll try to redo it when I have time. So, unless you're dying to hear these now, wait until next week to download them!

News! - I've fixed the Mozart recording as of 12/18/00 1:40AM PST. The Elgar will be done soon. :)

Program (click on links for MP3s): (offline!)

Mozart Divertimento in D Major, K.136 [96kbps]

Allegro [5.8 MB]
Andante [6.2 MB]
Presto [3.6 MB]

Elgar Serenade for Orchestra in e minor, Op. 20 [96kbps]

Allegro Piacevole [3.6 MB]
Larghetto [6.2 MB]
Allegretto [3.5 MB]

Performers:
Vln: Geoff Nuttall*, Benjamin Chen, Sabrina Lee, Jessica Tzou, Barry Shiffman*, Charlene Chen, Jim Chou, Hirohisa Tanaka
Vla: Lesley Robertson*, Joel Dawson, Mark McAuliffe
Cello: Eric Cheng, Ben Freivogel, Edward Wu

* Member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet