Soloduo was extraordinary last Friday evening.  We’ve received a flood of wonderful comments since the concert.  The Austin American Statesman’s Luke Quinton joined us for the concert, here is his glowing review.

The evening began at Gusto Italian Kitchen where we enjoyed a simply delicious pre-concert Italian dinner prepared specially for the concert.  If you haven’t been to a pre-concert dinner before, I hope you’ll consider it sometime!  They are a wonderful chance to meet old friends, new friends, and fans of great music.  I’ll typically say a few words about the upcoming concert (sometimes I’ll even play a bit on the guitar!).  Friday’s dinner was sponsored by Carl Caricari and Margaret Murray Miller – who are in this great picture (special thanks to Arlen Nydam, photographer, for this and all of the photos in this post):

We had a great group at dinner.  Here is our guest, Roberto Vasquez, pictured with Chuck Lutke, our Director of Development and Communications here at ACGS.

…and here I am, with my wife Glenda Lee:

The concert began, as nearly all of ours do, with a pre-concert performance by one of our school programs.  On Friday the performers were from the multi-award-winning McCallum High School Chamber Ensemble.  They had a trio, a quartet (which I can’t help mentioning, performed “Austin Tango” by Roland Dyens – a piece we commissioned in 2009!), and a large ensemble, pictured here.  They were fabulous, and our patrons were talking about their fantastic performance all night long.

Soloduo took the stage and were simply dazzling.  Some of the larger pieces on the program were Piazzolla’s “Tango Suite”, Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, and their amazing new arrangement of Beethoven’s complete “Moonlight Sonata”.  I love this picture Arlen took of some of our audience members – Catherine and David Wildermuth are in the front row here, with Flo Ann Randle and William Bednar in row 2.  The music-making was magnificent.

At intermission, the McCallum students sold concessions – looks like they had some business!  Smiling in the center of this picture is the director of the McCallum program, Mr. Andrew Clark.  He has much to be proud of.

…and the crowd goes wild!  Lorenzo Micheli (left) and Matteo Mela (right) gave a marvelous concert.  For an encore they treated us to a guitar duo arrangement of the Overture to Barber of Seville.  Wow.

We did something new at this concert!  Afterwards we invited everyone to a casual get together at Pinthouse Pizza on Burnet Road.  About 50 patrons joined us and we had long, spirited conversation – at least until the restaurant closed down!