A new second violinist for the Tasman String Quartet!

Anna van der Zee, Christiaan van der Zee and Miranda Wilson are thrilled to announce that New Zealand violinist Jennifer Banks has accepted an invitation to join the Tasman String Quartet. Our original second violinist James Andrewes left the quartet a month ago to pursue a career in early music, and we wish him well for all his future endeavours. We conducted a search process for his replacement, in which every one of the applicants was a violinist and chamber musician of outstanding quality. It was the hardest decision we have ever had to make, but we feel that Jenny's marvellously energetic playing and brilliant musicianship will inspire the TSQ to new heights in 2009! We will have new photographs up on this blog and on our website as soon as possible.

Happy New Year to all our friends and supporters!

TSQ at Grace Lutheran, Friday November 21, 2008

This is just a reminder to our Boulder readers that the second concert in our concert series at Grace Lutheran Church will take place this Friday, November 21 at 7.30pm (not Saturday, November 22 as initially advertised). We'll be playing an exciting programme of works by Schubert (the Quartettsatz D.703), Mozart (Quartet in D major K.575), and Beethoven (Quartet in F major Op. 59 No. 1, "Razumovsky"). We will be giving a pre-concert talk at 6.45. We recommend showing up early to get good seats, because some of the seats offer only partial visibility.

Grace Lutheran Church is located at 1001 13th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302. The church's phone number is (303) 442-1883. Tickets are by door sales only; adults $20, students and seniors $5 and children under 12 free.

We do hope you can make it! Grace Lutheran is a beautiful, acoustically perfect little church, and it's run by wonderful people. We're very excited about this concert series and are very much looking forward to Friday night. See you there!

The TSQ goes to Florida!

We spent the past week in Tampa, Florida, where we competed in the Rutenberg Chamber Music Competition. We were delighted to be accepted into the finals, and to win the Jeremy Rutenberg Prize for our performance of Haydn's "Emperor" Quartet. We stayed with the Painters, an amazing family who spoiled us rotten, and made some wonderful new friends among our fellow competitors and University of Southern Florida students.

We also found a little time to get away from our instruments! Here's a photo of the four of us at the end of the pier at Clearwater Beach, Florida, which was a pleasant drive across a causeway from Tampa. This was during a spectacular sunset where we spent some time watching flying pelicans diving into the sea for fish!

The next photo is at a miniature golf course where we went to relax after the competition was over! Chris won the game...

Our concert at Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

We normally use stands! This was taken after the concert, and we took the stands away so we could get a better picture. We hadn't played at Sacred Heart Cathedral before, and it was a really great experience.

On holiday

Following a successful and enjoyable tour to the New Zealand towns of Gore, Roxburgh, Wanaka, Te Awamutu, Rotorua, Taihape and Motueka for Chamber Music New Zealand, and some self-organized concerts in Auckland and Wellington, the Tasman String Quartet members are spending a few days apart in New Zealand (this almost never happens--we were even playing our instruments together on Christmas Day!). We thought it would be fun to share a few of the photos we took while we were on the road. This one features Anna, Miranda and James warming up in the smallest warm-up room in the world! Or at least the smallest one we've ever seen. It was the vestry of St. James' Anglican Church in Roxburgh, a beautiful nineteenth-century church where we played for a wonderful audience, who gave us our first ever standing ovation in New Zealand! (We got another one in Wellington--lucky us!)

This next picture was taken in Taupo, where we spent a couple of days rehearsing in between our Rotorua and Taihape concerts. (You can't see the spectacular views outside the window, but there were some!) We really relished the opportunity to see quite a lot of our country from out the windows of a series of rental cars and a borrowed van. One forgets how incredibly spectacular it is almost everywhere in New Zealand. This was definitely a tour to remember!

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the Tasman String Quartet's new blog! All four of us will be writing regularly here, and we hope our friends will visit this page to keep up with our travels!

For more information about the Tasman String Quartet, please visit our new website: http://www.tasmanstringquartet.com. To hear some of our online recordings, please visit our MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/tasmanstringquartet.

Check in again soon to read about our recent tour of small New Zealand centres for Chamber Music New Zealand, and to see the photographs we took!

Anna van der Zee
James Andrewes
Christiaan van der Zee
Miranda Wilson