Greetings and Happy New Year, Sybarite5 fans!

Welcome to our new webpage, complete with this spanking-new blog! This has been a really eventful year for us, and we are looking forward to more exciting projects coming up in 2011! We’d like to share a few stories and memories with you here, and please check back often to read about our continued adventures. Perhaps the highlight of the season thus far was performing at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC this past December.

We were invited to perform at the annual Stradivari Anniversary Concert, which meant that we all got to play on the beautiful collection of Stradivari instruments housed in the Library (well, 4 out of 5 of us did, as there are no Stradivari basses—sorry Louis!). We all arrived in DC two days before the concert, and were able to practice and rehearse on the instruments as much as we wanted. We couldn’t take them out of the Library, though, because they never leave! Most of the time they are behind glass cases, only being taken out for performances three to four times per year.

It was wonderful to be able to live with these instruments for a couple of days before performing on them, because we all felt that it was quite an adjustment to go from our regular instruments which most of us have had for years to the Strads, but an adjustment well worth making!