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By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star
The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, as most classical fans know by now, is celebrating its 50th-anniversary season. To exist that long means a wealth of memorable stories and anecdotes. Here are some of them:
* The Friends was one of this country's first chamber music presenters; only 23 organizations were offering exclusively chamber concerts at the time of the founding of the Friends, according to Dean Stein, executive director of Chamber Music America.
* Jean-Paul Bierny, the Friends' gung-ho president since 1977, was introduced to chamber music at a concert during his youth in his native Belgium. He sat in the back of a large hall and ``was bored to death.''
* Bierny calls his greatest personal contribution to the Friends the ``320 gallons of succulent chili'' he's served to performers and others at receptions after the concerts.
* Friends' audiences of the 1950s witnessed the last performance of the celebrated Paganini Quartet. That's because its violist died in a hotel room right after the concert, and the ensemble would only play with original personnel.
The surviving quartet members reportedly marveled that a community of 150,000 could produce a crowd of 650 for their concert.
* Nearly every chamber ensemble of repute has passed through town for a Friends concert. And many keep coming back to enjoy the Old Pueblo's sunshine and sights. For example, the Emerson String Quartet will offer its seventh Friends concert this season.
* Irving Coretz, one of the Friends' founding board members, recalls the time a quartet's first violinist forgot the pants to his tux suit - and walked on stage in the far-smaller trousers of a UA professor.
* George Rosenberg, another founding board member, remembers attending an early harpsichord recital in which the ticking of a clock on the wall all but drowned out the delicate, plucked sounds of the music.
* Members of the Tokyo String Quartet arrived here for a concert in the mid-1980s, thinking they could relax around a pool one day before the concert. Actually, they were scheduled to perform that evening; had they not heard an announcement on KUAT-FM, they might have missed the event.
* During the last few bars of a 1991 performance of the Brahms Piano Quintet by pianist Peter Orth and the Muir String Quartet, a microphone boom suddenly fell toward the Muir's violist. ``He simply got up and kept playing,'' Bierny said. ``He didn't miss a beat.''
* The Friends credits its success to regularly consulting its patrons, a practice that began in 1978 when 25 audience members voiced their concern over what Bierny calls ``stagnation'' caused by ``a decline in attendance (probably related to the hiring of some less-than-stellar groups)'' to save money.
Since that time, the organization has taken many steps, the most important of which is hiring the best musicians possible. Let's hope it continues to do that.