Fritz Quartet at PricewaterhouseCoopers Event

21 June 2007

This evening, the Fritz Quartet was invited to perform at the Retirement Dinner of Mr Phillip Tan from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Important guests included CEOs from various companies as well as a member of parliament. This event was held at the Garden Suite of The Oriental Singapore.

Beautiful!

Angie from PWC had generously arranged dinner for us, so it meant that we had energy to play later on in the evening! Thanks Angie. We also got a private room to ourselves to have our dinner. And it had a marvellous view too.

We were engaged for 2 sets, with the first set consisting of mostly classical tunes such as Schubert's Marche Militaire and Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. For the second set, we played largely Chinese oldies, as requested.

For this event, we roped in Zhangyi, a close friend of the quartet, to guest play with us. Meanwhile, Bingling, our 2nd violinist, decided that she wanted to play the viola during our set break.

We were all rather amused.

Response to our evening's performance was good, and we are glad that we had made a difference to the evening. A big thank you to Angie Chua from PricewaterhouseCoopers for being a marvellous organiser, as well as the staff from The Oriental for rendering assistance.

"we enjoyed the music and will look out for more opportunities to work together again" --Compliments from Angie

Birthday Party

2nd June

Today, the Fritz Quartet was invited to play for a private party held at the residence of Patrick and Linda Brookshaw. The theme for the night was "casual" which meant, YES!!!! JEANS!! for us!! We were welcomed warmly upon our arrival and we started our first set at 7.30pm. The neighbours and friends applauded after each song, and we enjoyed ourselves tremendously playing for the guests. We also found out that Patrick was a musician himself!

Mid-song, we got a request to play the birthday song. It was only then that we found out that it was Patrick's birthday!

Happy birthday Patrick!

Tze Chuan, Max and Johnny
still looking fresh after 2 sets

"will be using you lovely people again"- Patrick via sms

"Many thanks again for the excellent performance on Saturday evening . We thoroughly enjoyed it" - Linda via email

Random

Our cases

Apart from the curious stares we attract when people see us carrying our instruments in restaurants (and taking up space), we also get a fair share of attention when they see us on the train. In fact, en route to and fro rehearsals or performances, we have been stopped several times by concerned MRT staff, who are curious as to what our cases contain.

Especially Johnny.

We are friendly people though, so do say hi to us when you do spot us!

Anyway, we took a break from rehearsals on a Sunday night and met up for dinner, without our instruments.


From left: Wanyee (music arranger), Bing Ling, Johnny, Tze Chuan, Max

We also managed to get our hands on a live! recording of our performances at the Esplanade Concourse.

Finally, we are glad to announce that short clips of our performance at the Esplanade are up on our website.

Do check them out here.

29 May 2007

The Fritz Quartet was involved in a National Day videoshoot which took place at Connor Green at the Botanical Gardens. We had done photoshoots before, but not videoshoots, with a director yelling ACTION! so it was quite a novel experience.

We had a makeup artiste to assist us in our makeup, and she did a great job, as can be seen in the photos. Many joggers also stopped by to catch the filming in progress.

It was really hot and we were all baking under the afternoon heat. Of course, wearing black didn't help matters!

Max and Tze Chuan sharing a brief respite under the shade

waiting for instructions from the director

Tze Chuan and Bing Ling during a break.
(We caught the director on film! Hurrah!)

The flowergirls and boys were highly entertained by Max and his viola

We had to leave immediately after shooting wrapped up, so we didn't get a chance to mingle with the rest of the cast. Nevertheless it was an interesting experience for us! Thanks to Janelle from Full House Communications.

We took a cab to Tanglin Mall for dinner and it was such great relief to feel the cool breeze of the air-con from the shopping mall! We had just enough time to grab a quick bite before heading to our next event-- a private party hosted by Mr & Mrs Ab Meijer at their house.

It was again, an outdoor event, but thank goodness for the air-con that Mr Meijer kindly allowed out from his room!

the dinner setting prior to the arrival of guests

We played for 2 sets, and received kind compliments from the guests. Our attempt to leave quietly was thwarted when the guests applauded to show their appreciation as we wrapped up our last piece! Mr Meijer also informed us that he enjoyed our performance. Our thanks to Jasmine for coordinating the event.

It only occurred to us to take a photograph after we had kept all our instruments. But it is ok. We love our cases too.

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!