Fritz Quartet: Silver Screen Classics at the Concourse

Set list:

Theme from New York New York
Over the Rainbow
Can You Feel the Love Tonight
Theme from "Laputa", Castles in the Sky
Theme from Schindlers' List
Philip Glass String Quartet no 3, 1st movement ("Mishima")
Por Una Cabeza

DAY ONE (23rd May 2007)

We arrived at the Esplanade Concourse at around 5pm and met up with Jean, the Assistant Programming Officer. After a few detours, we managed to locate our dressing room and we worked through some parts that we had gone through the previous night at Johnny's place.

We then proceeded for our soundcheck at 6pm at the Concourse. It was the quartet's first performance at the Concourse, so we needed to make sure that the balance was right and get used to the acoustics.

After the soundcheck, we went back to the dressing room to prepare for our first show. Indeed an hour sped by so fast, it was soon 7.20pm and time to standby for our first set.

Next performance: 7.30pm. You can tell the audience is waiting impatiently for the show to begin when people start applauding once they see us walking towards the Concourse.

Max has the easy (or not) task of interacting with the audience

while the first violinist makes funny faces at people wielding cameras

You can tell from Johnny's smile that he is really enjoying himself. Either that or he is laughing at a funny squiggle in his score.

A "Schindler's-List'ic" feel

Day Two (24th May 2007)

Soundcheck at 6pm. Since we had already performed at the Concourse the previous night, we already had an idea of what was to be expected. We took it easy this time round for the soundcheck and we tried out Johnny's arrangement of "Shanghai Tan" just for fun. The arrangement was interesting! We didn't want to risk it so we did not include it in our set list, though we certainly attracted quite a fair amount of attention playing that during our soundcheck!

That's us playing the Theme from New York New York

Tze Chuan, the first violinist



Bingling, the 2nd violinist


Johnny, the cellist

Max, the violist

We were pleasantly surprised by the turnout, considering it was a weekday night, and there were no other performances going on in the theatre (Phantom of the Opera had ended its run), or in the concert hall for that matter.

All smiles now for the camera!

Thank you to the Esplanade for inviting us to play at the Concourse. Thanks as well to the tech crew for making us sound good.

Thank you to Nadia, Junlin, Emma and Alexis for taking such beautiful photos of our performances (no money to employ an official photographer).

The 2 nights at the Esplanade Concourse really passed in a whirlwind for us. To think that we only finalised the repertoire for the evening about a week ago. Yes, we had so many pieces to choose from, it was hard to narrow the choices down to fit a 30-minute programme. It has been a great experience for the Fritz Quartet, and we are glad we had the chance to share our music with everyone who was there. Thanks to all for coming down to watch us, we are really thankful for your support.

To all who might have caught us in action, do leave a comment as we would love to hear from you!

If you had taken any photographs, video or audio recordings of us, please also send us a copy to fritzquartet (at) gmail (dot) com. Your contributions would be greatly appreciated, and definitely acknowledged. Hope to hear from you. :)

Cheers!