Strings, Sax, and a Dash of Sass

Concert music soars at the Gardner Museum’s Calderwood Hall

Aiming to “mix up genres and provoke the audience,” says A Far Cry violinist Alex Fortes ’07, the chamber orchestra performs Béla Bartók’s Divertimento for strings, then joins saxophonist Harry Allen to explore the 1961 musical work Focus. Composed by Eddie Sauter for Stan Getz, the tenor saxophonist improvises against a score for strings. Why the pairing? Bartók’s piece “broke new ground in form and craft,” Fortes says. Bartók also championed Sauter, whose lead movement in Focus, “I’m Late, I’m Late,” echoes Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. The self-conducted A Far Cry has 17 young musicians (including Sarah Darling ’02 and Miki-Sophia Cloud ’04) all intent, Fortes says, on “inspiring and enlivening an audience through performance of classical music—broadly defined.” The group has released five albums, performed with Yo-Yo Ma ’76, D. Mus. ’91, among others, and is in residence at the Gardner Museum. 

You might also like

“It’s Tournament Time”

Harvard women’s basketball prepares for Ivy Madness.

A Harvard Agenda Shaped by Speech

The work underway in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Dialogue, not Debate

American University’s Lara Schwartz, J.D. ’98, teaches productive disagreement.

Most popular

alt text here

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

Lola Mullaney, Coach Carrie Moore, and Elena Rodriguez

“It’s Tournament Time”

Harvard women’s basketball prepares for Ivy Madness.

View of Harvard University campus from the Charles River

Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard

The president emeritus on elite universities’ academic accomplishments—and a rising tide of antagonism

More to explore

Winthrop Bell

Brief life of a philosopher and spy: 1884-1965

Talking about Talking

Fostering healthy disagreement

A Dogged Observer

Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason takes the long view.