Summer Outlook

Writing from the Newark, NJ airport as we await our plane's arrival; due to some serious thunderstorms in the area this afternoon our plane was diverted to Philadelphia, so our return to San Francisco has been delayed a couple of hours.

This week's tour feels like a great success. We participated for the first time in the Vivace! International Music Festival at the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster, PA, coaching student ensembles from across the U.S., Hungary and China and performing a heavy-hitting program of Mendelssohn's Quartet Op.13 and Schubert's Quartettsatz and Death & the Maiden in the Academy's beautiful new Steinman Hall.

The following day we drove back up to Jersey where we performed the same program for a virtually sold-out crowd (just over 800 people) in Princeton University's Richardson Auditorium on their Summer Concerts Series. On both concerts we were happy to oblige with an encore of a movement from Benjamin Lees' 5th Quartet, one of three (#s 1, 5 and 6) featured on the new Naxos disc that will be released in July.

If you're interested, check out our recently updated myspace page; languishing for a couple of years without a refresh, as Facebook and now Twitter have been taking up so much of people's attention, we've just gone through and replenished the content there to try and match the rest of our web-presence...

Well, the sky seems to be clearing; hopefully our plane will soon be on its way here from its Philly - oops! announcement just came over the PA system that in fact it diverted to Baltimore instead... - pit-stop and we'll find ourselves back in SF before, well, by midnight if we're lucky... Here's hoping your own travels run more smoothly this summer!

Thanks for reading,
The Cypress String Quartet