…surf over to our sister ship, Chamber Musician Today, and check out today’s menu.  We have the latest installment in violinist Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi’s remarkable continuing memoirs of growing up as an almost child prodigy driven by the dreams of a needy and demanding mother.  Her story is as riveting as it is painful.  Alison Lowell, aka oboetoast, has a piece about what you can learn from negative critiques (as in when a teacher you respect says “Oh, no,  I don’t think you’re conservatory material.”)   On a lighter note, Elaine Fine tells you where you can find the free sheet music

The Takacs Quartet gave the U.K. premiere of Daniel Kellogg’s Soft Sleep Shall Contain You, a hauntingly beautiful, touching “Meditation on Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.” The BBC has made the performance available online here. Kellogg’s quartet is a simply beautiful, evocative work that comments–at times gently, at others savagely, ultimately transcendently–on the refrain of Schubert’s famous song, “Death and the Maiden” (and, by extension–and design–the string quartet which bears its name thanks to the variation movement based on this same music). It is a little gem, its biggest–and only–flaw, perhaps, that it feels slight for a piece that is

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance’s second Student Composers’ concert of the year took place this last Monday, November 15. A hefty buffet of close to two hours of music, I found the evening passed by quickly and satisfactorily because each work was strikingly self-confident and virtually every moment of music was significant such that it never seemed like the pieces were treading water. Beyond this, the concert was particularly remarkable because of the prevalent display of composition students’ performing abilities. Only three of the night’s eight pieces lacked a composer-performer, and two among the other