Sunday afternoon was the first concert in Carthage’s Chamber Music Series, which has been a wonderful fine arts offering for more than a decade. Groups as famous as the Juilliard String Quartet and Chanticleer have been featured, but I’m not sure that anyone has knocked our socks off like the three Canadiens who played for us yesterday afternoon. The Gryphon Piano Trio is a group I had never heard of, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I was not especially optimistic. I was sort of there because I was supposed to be there, as a member of the music faculty – not because I was expecting to be thrilled. But this was a stupendous performance and by the end I was cheering along with everyone else who was lucky enough to be there.
This whole series has been an eye-opening experience for me because my musical preferences have tended toward BIG. That’s one of the reasons why I love opera so much – the most extravagant of all art forms – and especially those operas like Turandot and Gotterdammerung and Boris Godunov that threaten to blow the roof off of the place. When you have those kind of sounds in your head, it’s hard to believe that one pianist, one violinist and one cellist can provide anything remotely approaching the same sort of visceral thrill. But the Gryphon Trio did that for me yesterday, especially in the last piece of the concert- Dvorak’s Dumky Trio. I had no idea that three musicians could produce such a thundering sound – but they were much more than loud. They were elegant and expressive and played as one – – – which is just about the most exciting thing that music has to offer.
If this series has taught me anything, it’s that chamber music – for all its intimacy – can really pack a great punch when it’s done at this level. I really hadn’t heard world class chamber music making like this since way back in the summer of 1984, when I attended the Blossom Festival – the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Although I was there to sing, lots of the musicians were there for their string quartet camp . . . and the best of those quartets were mind- blowingly wonderful. To watch musicians in such perfect sync with one another – as though sharing one mind – was revelatory to me and to most singers who tend not to operate that way, especially in the rather pompous world of opera!
This series has also educated me about the special splendor of the Piano Trio, about which I knew next to nothing before this series came along. It turns out that the Piano Trio is a fascinating creature – which combines the close precision of the string quartet with the flamboyance and freedom of solo playing – since the piano foundation allows both the violin and cello to act much more like soloists than would otherwise be possible.
Anyway, I was so happy to be there. . . and not just because it was rainy and miserable outside. Even had it been sunny and gorgeous, I would not have wanted to miss one moment of this terrific concert.
pictured: the Trio is about to play their encore. Visible in the front row of the audience are (at the far left) Carthage President F. Gregory Campbell – Music Professor Emeritus Richard Sjoerdsma (gray sweater) who created the series – and Jane Livingston (on the aisle) head of our piano department and the current coordinator of the series.