Borromeo creates a 'living archive'

The Borromeo Quartet is creating its own "living archive" by recording most of its concerts and making them available to the public. Rock stars have been doing this for a while, but Borromeo first violinist Nicholas Kitchen believes the quartet is the first to try it in the classical-music field.

Kitchen began recording and digitally filming many of the quartet's concerts last year, and recently the quartet has been selling the results on its website (www.borro

meoquartet.com). Sunday's FleetBoston Celebrity Series concert in Jordan Hall (with clarinetist Richard Stoltzman joining the quartet) will be the latest release and will mark the formal launch of the Living Archive initiative. CDs are $20; DVDs are $25, as is a CD-plus-VHS combo. (The website accepts major credit cards and PayPal.) Turnaround time is currently about two weeks. Earlier this week, Kitchen explained: "We had done enough recording that I had started to learn about the techniques and some of the issues involved. I began to carry around a little suitcase of equipment, a mobile recording unit, to take down our concerts because I thought it was too bad that so many just vanish into thin air. If something went wonderfully, we love to study just how and why it happened. It is also important for us to study what didn't go so well."

From here Kitchen had only to educate himself about digital cameras. "I frame a decently close shot, including some of the environment, but focusing on the musicians. There's nothing elaborate, but the DVDs give a sense of what it is like to sit in a seat at one of our concerts."

Then the quartet began to think about the potential uses for their growing archive. "We can organize the material in any way we want," Kitchen says, "and so can the buyer -- by composer, for example, taking material from several concerts. People can also have the option of buying the concert they went to, or we can suggest that we feel that another performance is the one we like the best. The archive can also be used for educational purposes -- a library to which we can direct students."

The quartet plays about 80 concerts a year, and it isn't possible for Kitchen to tape all of them (Lincoln Center, for example, has strict rules against it). But he records all the concerts he can. "The website is a little out of date," he admits, "and there are many other performances that are available that we need to post -- like the concert at the Gardner Museum earlier this month, with the Ligeti First Quartet and the Brahms Second. We're happy with how that turned out."

Coming together: "Solo-Tutti: The Evolution of the Concerto and the Soloist" is the title of a two-day festival of free contemporary-music concerts presented by the Fromm Players at Harvard, March 5-6 in Paine Hall.

Coordinated by composer Joshua Fineberg, the programs focus on developing relationships between soloist and ensemble in music ranging from a 20th-century classic like Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961) to more recent works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Mario Davidovsky, and Giacinto Scelsi (Friday at 8 p.m.) and George Crumb, Gyorgy Ligeti, Bernard Rands, and Tristan Murail (Saturday at 8 p.m.).

Soloists include Robert Levin (harpsichord) and Ya-Fei Chuang (piano) in the Carter; French flutist Patrice Bocquillon appears in the Sciarrino and Murail works. Emmanuel Feldman is soloist in the Ligeti Cello Concerto. There is also a panel discussion with Davidovsky and Rands on Friday at 2 p.m., in the Davison Room in the Music Building at Harvard.