If you have never experienced a classical music concert and have always wanted to go, or have negative recollections of a high school performance or Music 101 in college, the concert series Free for All at Town Hall is for you. The next free concert is on Sunday, May 4 at 5:00 p.m. featuring the chamber music group Tashi. Tickets for the concert are distributed at noon on the day of the concert at New York's Town Hall.
When Tashi premiered 35 years ago, they were considered quite extraordinary by championing contemporary music along with the classics and for performing at unlikely venues. As Donal Henahan noted in the August 24, 1974 New York Times, "Peter Serkin and his friends put together a program of happily chosen music, and performed throughout with a rare amalgam of rapturous freedom and stylistic precision."
Sunday's concert will be a reunion for this group and for the piece that brought them together as a chamber music ensemble, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen's work which was written in and first played in a German prisoner-of-war camp on January 15, 1941, was a product of his wartime experience as a German prisoner-of-war and in his deeply felt religious mysticism. The original artists comprising Tashi, pianist Peter Serkin, violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman will perform this work. Charles Wuorinen's Ave Maria...Virgo Serena of Josquin des Prez and Christes Crosse of Thomas Morley and Toru Takemitsu's Quatrain II are also on the program.
To help you catch gain an understanding of classica music, the Library has David Pogue's Classical Music for Dummies and Tim Smith's The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Classical Music.