Riches from a very long day

A large number of short pieces led yesterday to a musical experience of Wagnerian proportions. For the first time in my life that I remember, I attended two concerts in one day. No single work on either program lasted more than fifteen minutes, but together they added up to more than five hours of music. At 3 p.m. the Fine Art Music Company presented a concert of music for violin, saxophone and piano at Ivy Hall (in the Georgian mansion known as the International Institute for Culture) on Lancaster Avenue. Then, at 7, Andrea Clearfield hosted her monthly salon at her home downtown.

Maybe I was just fresher in the afternoon, but I would have to say that, while both programs were memorable, for musical satisfaction, the Ivy Hall program had the edge. (It also had chairs. In Andrea’s living room, most guests sit on the floor.) Jonathan Moser played the Debussy Violin Sonata with just the right combination of lightness and grit, accompanied with expert deference by Katarzyna Marzec-Salwinski, and Jeremy Juteson introduced me to the sound world of Joan Tower with Wings for solo saxophone, a tour de force of tone color and rapid mood shifts. (The piece depicts a falcon in flight, Justseon said, and both the score and the performance certainly made the inspiration clear.)

The program also included Hindemith’s Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 31, No. 2, and two attractive if slighter works, the Trio for Violin, Alto Saxophone and Piano by Jeffrey Quick, and Cantilene et Danse, for the same three instruments, by Marc Eychennne. The middle movement of the Quick was titled “The Answered Question,” a shout-out to Charles Ives, though the composer took too big a chance by inviting a comparison. The music came nowhere near capturing Ives’s sense of wonder. As an expression of faith, it struck me as a little too self-satisfied.

I was going to skip Andrea’s Salon this month until I learned it would include music by my longtime acquaintance Sheridan Seyfried, whom I first interviewed for his hometown newspaper more than a decade ago, on the occasion of his acceptance to the Curtis Institute of Music. Sheridan and three of his Curtis friends performed a short, exuberant work for piano quartet that deconstructs a well-known patriotic air. I refrain from naming it, since, in accordance with the composer’s intention, no one outside a circle of initiates is ever supposed to guess what it is.  

The music at Andrea’s salons is always diverse, and last night’s program gave me my first glimpse of a wholesome young folk group called Sunday Muse, and the singer-songwriter Alexandra Day, who had some funny patter. The five-star discovery of the night, however, was Karolina Syrovatkova, a wafer-thin Czech pianist with a delicate jaw like the limb of a crescent moon. She played a dance and a folk-song arrangement by Smetana, and her touch seemed a miracle of weightlessness.  

I did not get home until  close to midnight, and falling asleep was not an issue.