Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog

This afternoon, we finished recording the last notes of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with clarinetist H?kan Rosengren at Round Top's Festival Hill in Texas. We're very pleased with the sound quality, thanks to Sugar Hill recording studio's Andy Bradley and our producer, Katherine Powers. This completes an album of quintets we have recorded with H?kan. Last January, we recorded Brahms's clarinet quintet, also at Round Top. The record will be released initially on Round Top records some time this spring.

It has been a wonderful experience recording at Round Top. Not only does it demand that we be in top form, but the tremendous improvement in both our musical risk-taking and technical finish has been very gratifying. In addition, the concert hall at Festival Hill in Round Top has remarkable acoustics, eliminating the need for any post-production of the sound-tweaking variety. Even more importantly, we were able to take all the time we needed to make the recording, without having to cut corners in the quality of the final product. For this, we are eternally grateful to Round Top for hosting the recording and for hiring us to play a concert there, this being our third appearance during the winter concert season. We are particularly excited to hear this album, as it represents some of our best playing to date, and who wouldn't want to hear Brahms and Mozart's Clarinet Quintets

Well, perhaps those who have never heard the pieces before. If you are one of these poor souls, you can catch an excerpt of the Mozart from a live radio broadcast we played on Houston's KUHF radio station's "The Front Row" radio show this past Tuesday afternoon. An audio mp3 is available to hear the interview and performance at http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/thefrontrow/2006/01/060117Chiara_96k.m3u. In the show, we performed the ebullient first movement and powerfully transcendent second movement of the quintet. One thing that continues to amaze me about Mozart as his 250th birthday approaches next week is how through tremendous simplicity he managed to find such profound meaning. What a guy!

We will be performing the Mozart Quintet along with two of his quartets at Round Top on Saturday, those of you who are in Houston or Austin, you can make reservations at http://festivalhill.org/cgi-bin/online/storepro.php.

PEAR 1.4.6 was just released at pear.php.net (http://pear.php.net/PEAR). This is a minor bugfix release and complete details are available at pear.php.net, but I must stress two points with extreme seriousness:

1. PEAR 1.4.6 fixes make install-pear INSTALL_ROOT=/rpm/packaging and introduces the --packagingroot option to install, which works like --installroot worked in PEAR 1.3.x
2. PEAR 1.3.x has several serious bugs and at least 2 serious security vulnerabilities. Using PEAR 1.3.x on a production machine is EXTREMELY dangerous

The second point applies to all people who think that the latest vulnerability in PEAR can be fixed in 1.3.5 with a simple patch. There are several unpublished serious bugs. A few days back, I was contacted by a diligent developer of a linux distribution who was wondering how serious the vulnerability in PEAR 1.4.2 and earlier is, and whether it would be possible to get a patch for PEAR 1.3.5. After reflection on the serious bugs in PEAR 1.3.x that were fixed in PEAR 1.4.x with unit testing, I came to realize that there is yet another serious security vulnerability in PEAR 1.3.x. I will publish the details shortly.pear.php

Don't hesitate, upgrade to PEAR 1.4.6 at your earliest convenience.