Welcome to our August Newsletter!
Wild Ginger in the Woods
Getting Ready for a New Kind of Sarasa Season 2020-21
Dear Sarasa Family
Greetings! We hope this finds each and every one of you healthy, safe and finding some sort of sanity during some extraordinarily challenging times on so many fronts.
With September around the corner, we are seeking a way to bring music to you in as safe a fashion as possible, which at this moment and time, means virtually and streamed over the internet. With First Parish in Lexington remaining closed to the public and Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church in Cambridge able to open its doors to a total capacity of only 25 people (including musicians and staff!), we regretfully will not be able to perform live in the Boston area for our first program Don Quixote - Knight Errant in September. Instead, we will open our 2020-21 season up in Brattleboro, Vermont on Friday, 18th September. We are delighted that all seven musicians involved in the first program are willing to become a special Sarasa social pod, so that we may rehearse and play together again.
As some of you may know, Vermont has fared a bit better than many U.S. states, and its guidelines allow gatherings of 25% capacity in an indoor venue. We will perform the program as planned, but in a slightly truncated format of two sittings of one hour each: at 5pm and 7pm on Friday, September 18th at the Brattleboro Music Center with 50-60 audience members permitted at each seating. We will film these concerts, and stream it to you and the wider public on Sunday, September 20th at 3.30pm. The link will be available for a week. We will send out an email about all of the particulars for ticketing and subscriptions in the coming days. Thank you for your continued patience with the constantly changing landscape for musical events at this time!
We certainly hope our November program will take place as planned in Cambridge and Lexington.
Outreach Update
As you may guess, it is impossible for us to visit the incarcerated teenage facilities in Massachusetts right now. Tim Merton has been on the phone several times to see if we might play in the courtyard of one of the detention centers, but the logistics are too complicated. With that in mind, we hope to present some selections from our September program (led by Tim) in an hour-long film especially produced for the teens. We miss seeing them and tapping into their huge pool of talent, but we hope to read or hear about their reactions!
Move over Errol Garner….Concert-by-the-Pond
How many of you have been captivated and enthralled by Errol Garner’s famous Concert-by-the-Sea, a live concert and recording from 1955 Carmel, California? Well, Tim Merton and Jennifer Morsches didn’t quite replicate that, but they did give a much needed public concert at their pond in Putney, VT for a safe, physically-distanced group of 60 people or so. With the need for live music, the hopes for a small gathering during these trying times, the hour-long concert featured music by Gabrielli, Bach, Bartok, Saint-Saëns, Iz and Louis Armstrong. Here is a clip of Tim and Jennifer performing Gabrielli’s Canon for Two Cellos.
The chance to play live for a real audience was such a wonderful escape in a magical setting, and the weather held!
