Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog

Bonjour mes amis!

Once again, the Chiara Quartet has been selected to compete in the semi-finals of a major international string quartet competition along with only 8 other quartets, this time in Bordeaux, France, just 1 week after competing in Italy (it's a rough life, I know). We will be performing in the Grand Theatre in Bordeaux tomorrow (Tuesday June 28) at 12:15 PM local time (GMT +01:00). Unfortunately, there is no webcast in this competition, so you have to show up in person to hear us. The finals are on the next day, should we be lucky enough to advance.

The results are in for the 7th Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition!

1st: Pavel Haas Quartet from the Czech Republic
2nd: Tankstream Quartet from Australia
3rd: Chiara Quartet from USA
4th: Biava Quartet from USA
Special prize for best performance of Peter Maxwell Davies piece: Haas Quartet

The judges deliberated for a record 4 1/2 hours, finally reaching a decision at 12:30 AM Italian time. Of the original 22 quartets, the highest number ever accepted into the first round, 14 advanced to the semi-finals, far more than usual, and 6 quartets were in the finals, also more than usual. The level this year is extraordinary, which bodes well for the careers of the winners as well as the other quartets, and for chamber music in general.

3rd prize includes a cash prize of 6,600 Euros and a performance on the winner's concert this Sunday.

Tomorrow, June 17 2005, at 12:10 PM (GMT +01:00, 6:10 AM EST), we will perform in the finals of the Premio Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy. From the original and unusually large field of 22 quartets, the judges have winnowed down to 6 who will compete for the three prizes.

You can listen to us live at http://webradio.iteatri.re.it/

Our performance in the semi-finals of Premio Paolo Borciani will be webcast live at http://webradio.iteatri.re.it from Reggio Emilia, Italy at 10 AM local time, which is 4 AM EST for those on the East Coast.

Well, today is a very good day.

Upon arriving in Bologna 3 days ago, we were stunned to discover that between the four of us, Air France managed to lose every bag we had checked from JFK -> Charles de Gaulle -> Bologna. That's 7 bags, count 'em. Because of TSA security, I have always packed my cello's endpin in the luggage to avoid a nasty scene (I'm sorry sir, we have to confiscate your instrument because it has a long metal spike). So, not only did we have no clothes, I had to play the cello viola da gamba style.

A testament to the generosity of the Premio Borciani folks: they managed to unearth a local cellist who lent me her endpin to use for as long as I needed! Needless to say, this was a lifesaving gesture and has allowed us to prepare for the elimination round (we play tomorrow).

Our luggage arrived mid-afternoon yesterday, which could not have been better timing. Hooray!

Bongiorno! I am writing this entry from Reggio Emilia, Italia where the weather is unbelievable and the generosity overflows.

That, however, is not the point of this entry. After a full year's vacation from phpDocumentor development, I finally took up the mantle again and have started fixing bugs in 1.3.0RC3 in preparation for RC4. In order to do this, I exported the bug list from sourceforge in xml format, and wrote a simplexml-based browser in about 1 hour. Development actually began in the terminal at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, and is moving quite briskly. 5 bugs down so far, averaging about 1 bug every 10 minutes of development time. Hopefully, by the time I return from Europe all of them will have been fixed

Well, wish us luck.

Tomorrow we travel to Italy to attempt the improbable: to win a prize in an international string quartet competition. Over the past year, we have prepared 9 different works, including 2 written expressly for the competitions by world-renowned composers Peter Maxwell-Davies and Gy?rgy Kurt?g. It's been wonderful playing this music for audiences all over the U.S., including recent New York concerts where we had a chance to try out the Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven in high-profile concerts where the pressures are similar to that in the international competition arena. If we were to win either competition, it would be the first time an American group has ever taken the top prize.

Alongside making a recording, nothing has a faster improvement rate than preparing for a competition. In fact, we've been doing both this year in the hopes that we will reach new heights of quartet playing in the process. Regardless of the result, we already feel pretty good about where we've travelled inside the music of Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Hindemith, Bart?k and the other two guys.

Winning a prize would be nice, but if nothing else, we definitely plan to bring back fine wine and cheese!

I hear there is a free internet terminal in Italy, I might blog about events as they go down.

What a nice party - everyone is getting warm and fuzzy about PHP at 10 years of age, and why not join in

I first encountered PHP in 1999 or 2000 while attempting to maintain server-side includes and perl code for simple scripts at the backend for http://www.chiaraquartet.net. These were not complicated scripts, simply a form mailer and some basic attempts to set up a web counter (*shudder*). However, implementing them was a real pain in the rear end. I discovered PHP in one of the early 4.0.x versions, and was amazed at the simplicity of performing the same tasks I had tried to do with Perl via CGI.

In the fall of 2000, my quartet embarked on a professional career. At the time, we were juggling requests from myriad organizations for concerts and other events, and couldn't keep things straight. After missing one event due to simply forgetting about it, I wrote a Microsoft Access-based application for keeping track of our schedule, contacts, and repertoire information. Some simple Visual Basic-based forms managed to unearth serious bugs in MS Access within the first 4 hours of programming. I ended up spending 85% of my time trying to work around the bugs in Access. It was not long after this that I realized the solution would be to port the entire thing over to a LAMP-based solution. This would also allow us to access the schedule on the road. Perfect!