Slave to the Notes

I got a couple of firsts in tonight.

After dinner at Toast with two of my favorite people, I made my way to Balliceaux for Classical Revolution RVA. I'd missed the chance to see classical musicians doing small group performances as part of this new series, so tonight was my chance to see what it was all about.

I loved their issue with live music: that all kinds of music are available easily and cheaply around town...except classical. And their aim is to correct that.

Walking in, I found a friend at the front bar and spent some time discussing my recent trip to Italy. Since he's been there many times, he was curious to hear my impressions.

"Yea, the men are really bold," he grinned.

Once in the back room, a chair was found for me and when I heard they were out of Cazadores,  my server graciously offered to introduce me to a new tequila. It was Kah Reposado, which sounds innocuous enough, but comes in a yellow skull-shaped bottle with Day of the Dead imagery on it.
The bottle was so over the top that I assumed the tequila couldn't be any good. Wrong.

With my front row seat and new libation, I was all set for an evening of classical interpretations. Unfortunately, I'd missed the first couple of them.

I arrived in time for some Shostakovitch duos played spiritedly enough to assure me I was in the right place. That was followed by a duo doing Dvorak's "Slovanik Fantasy" but only after apologizing for having played it as recently as August.

As one who'd missed August's performance, I had no problem with a repeat in November.

Maria and Ross followed doing Stravinsky's "Duo Concertant," a piece they'd been playing for the Richmond Ballet's Studio 2 series the past two weekends. But as Ross explained, when doing it for the Ballet, they'd been slaves to the dance and now planned to do the five movements exactly as Stravinsky had notated them.

Translation: wicked fast.

Maria's hand over hand technique and the speed of the piece resulted in her hands being nothing short of a blur most of the time. Later she admitted that while it was difficult to learn, now it was just fun to play. That's a musician nerd for you.

We moved from the past to the present with Michael Daugherty's "Diamond in the Rough," a 2006 piece based in Mozart. The trio had way more than three instruments to bring this piece to life: violin, viola and an array of percussion and a percussionist with passion.

Playing chimes, glockenspiel, triangle, tambourine and four wine glasses filled to varying heights with water, he was a one man band inside the trio. Rubbing the glasses emitted an eerie whine. The glockenspiel provided the energy. The triangle punctuated at just the right moments. And the tambourine was really a movable drum.

By the end of the piece, the whole thing sounded like a hoedown on speed. And then it was over. Classical Revolution RVA starts on time and ends at a reasonable hour.

In between, people eat, drink and listen to music with no annoying chatter to distract from the musicians doing their thing. I just may have a new series to add to my calendar.

We'll see about adding the Kah to my rotation.