Examiner review of violinist Kay Stern & friends — 2011 October 4
October is the month of the Russian Music Festival in the Noontime Concerts™ series (“San Francisco’s Musical Lunch Break”) at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. Today the Festival was launched by violinist Kay Stern, along with five of her friends, violinist Dawn Harms, violists Elizabeth Prior and Emily Onderdonk, and cellists Thalia Moore and Michelle Djokic. There was only one work on the program by that most Russian of composers, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; but the selection was his Italianate string sextet (hence the need for five friends), the Opus 70 in D major composed in 1890, which he called “Souvenir de Florence.”