After last weekend’s adventure with my faculty recital, I was only too pleased to spend this weekend as a happy audience member in a series of three performances that I’m calling the Three Home Runs.
It all started with a Friday night recital by Trio Levade, featuring the head of Carthage’s keyboard department, Jane Livingston. Trios are such a wonderful and exciting kind of chamber music and in stark contrast to the typical string quartet, which is sort of put together like an intricate machine, with each part very much equal to the other and existing for the sake of the others. But because trios have a piano offering a full foundation, the violin and cello can be given much freer reign. . . and the three instruments behave much more like soloists. It gives trios a much more rhapsodic flair to them, and I have come to a very deep appreciation for them since coming to Carthage. What was especially exciting Friday night was that the Trio Levade tackled what many people regard as the Mount Everest of piano trios, the “Archduke” by Ludwig van Beethoven. He wrote this in 1814, but it wasn’t premiered until 1817 – and its world premiere was the final time that Beethoven played the piano in public. (By this point, he was pretty much completely deaf.) As these three gifted musicians played, and especially as I listened to Jane courageously contend with this brutally demanding piano part, I had this strange sensation of being in the presence of Beethoven himself – or if not quite that, it was possible to think about that first performance in 1817 and imagine what it would have been like to have sat in that audience when this music was heard for the very first time. (It was the first time I had ever heard the piece in its entirety.) It was thrilling.
Then Saturday afternoon, the Concert Band and Wind Orchestra combined in a free-wheeling concert devoted to none other than Baseball! Jim Ripley, a huge baseball fan (and a gifted player of the game once upon a time) programmed a series of pieces either about baseball or written by famous composers who were huge baseball fans themselves. It was supposed to be an outdoors concert but Mother Nature had other ideas- but Siebert Chapel is a splendid place for bands to perform and I was secretly delighted that we got to hear them inside in their full glory. They played a well-known musical version of “Casey at the Bat” with Paul Heglund, assistant to President Campbell, serving as a very skilled narrator. There was also a fun medley from “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,” a musical in which baseball figures prominently. But my favorite piece on the concert was a very rarely heard Sousa march from 1924 called “The National Game,” which calls at four points in the score for the sound of a bat hitting a baseball. Dr. Ripley came up with a fantastic gimmick that made this piece even more entertaining. To do the baseball-hitting part, he called out from the band a saxophonist named Mike Ward who was a very fine baseball player in high school. Everyone was expecting great things from Mike- a big strapping guy- but then when it came time to hit the ball off of the tee, he completely missed it! Twice! It was all for show, of course- as was Dr. Ripley leading a “downcast” Mike back to his place in the band. Then a few moments later, a perky blonde from the audience came bounding up to the front of the room (this is all while the march is being played- there was no stopping for any of this theatrical action” to occur) and offered to do the ball-hitting. . . and of course, she nails it without any problem at all. Becky Ryan is her name, and she could not have been more perfectly cast! And the audience loved it! The whole concert was fun, right up to the final piece by Charles Ives, but what was truly amazing was that they were playing this impressively so early in the year. Talk about hitting the ground running! (and by the way, I love that every member of the band was dressed in some sort of baseball shirt or jersey.)
The third and final performance was this afternoon, and it was a faculty recital of my voice colleague Corinne Ness. Her primary training, she reminded us, was in opera- and in fact her recital last year was completely classical . . . but this year she decided to go all jazz, with her husband David accompanying her on guitar. What a pleasure to hear these songs sung so musically and expressively- with crystal clear clarity – and with such intelligence. There was nothing sloppy or careless about any of this- she obviously cared about each and every one of these songs every bit as much as the classical songs and arias she sang last year. And why not? Doesn’t “Making Whoopee” deserve as much care as any aria by Rossini? And of course it was a special treat to see a husband and wife on that stage. Dave is a superlative musician (and a really great guy) and I was so glad that the whole second half of the recital was given over to his Jazz Trio. They were outstanding.
So there you have it. . . three fantastic concerts and recitals that were a perfect demonstration of how vibrantly music lives at Carthage these days. And thanks to an exceptionally gifted and committed freshman class, I see even more splendid days ahead for us. . . which makes me all the more grateful to be one small part of it all.
pictured above: Dr. Jim Ripley conducting the combined bands – and Becky Ryan looking triumphant after having just hit the ball successfully. They were using some sort of contraption in which the ball his hit off of a tee- but it’s connected by some sort of thin elastic cable which causes it to snap right back into place in time for the next time. I’m enough of a baseball moron to have no idea if this device is found at little league practices – but it sure worked great.