Chamber Music Sedona brought the most eclectic and unique concert of this year’s music season to the stage of the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Sunday, Jan. 7, when it hosted violinist Tessa Lark, bassist Michael Thurber and harpist Charles Overton for a genre-bending afternoon of unexpected moves on string instruments.
Overton’s appearance was particularly noteworthy as the first time in its 41-year history that CMS has featured a harpist.
Lark and Overton started the show with Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Fantaisie for violin and harp,” which, in a sense, was one of the concert’s oddities, because it had actually been written for violin and harp, unlike a number of the other arrangements they went on to perform. The “Fantaisie” is a melting exchange between the two instruments that gave ample scope for Overton to demonstrate both his confident handling of the massive pedal harp and the subtlety of the tones he could draw from it, while Lark showed off her lively fingerwork. Their performance also revealed the skill of Saint-Saëns in structuring the composition to achieve the greatest complementarity between the two string instruments. The mood of the music shifted continually, being by turns languishing, spirited, tormented, jaunty, frenzied and determined.
Next, Overton flew solo with a placid, reflective early work of his own titled “Once More.” Incorporating teasingly familiar melodic elements, it was written more like a vocal than an instrumental work, with the harp returning over and over to a chorus as a singer would. If the sight of an early-morning summer sun sparkling on dewdrops on the leaves could be translated into sound, this piece gave an idea of one way those light rays might sound.
The full trio took the stage for the first time for their arrangement of the traditional Irish tune “The Boy in the Gap,” which began with aching, warbling notes on the violin and bass that sounded almost Egyptian before getting friskier and friskier. Cascading and infectious, it featured a prominent middle section for the harp before peaking and dying away in the sonic shape of a parabola.
It’s always amazing to see the effect that Irish music with a good beat has on an audience — they can never stop themselves from moving to it.
Lark and Thurber then offered the listeners two of their joint compositions. “Wooden Soldier” combined both traditional and modern Appalachian styles, as well as some rapid chords that challenged even Lark’s virtuosity and a quotation from the Irish Rovers’ “Drunken Sailor.” The low, intense preliminary tones of “Cedar and Sage” gradually blended into an astonishing series of sweetly-rounded notes from the violin and next into a more folksy and country attitude. Both pieces relied on plenty of plucking from Thurber.
Overton returned to accompany Thurber in the first and last movements from Henry Eccles’ Sonata for Violin in G Minor, a piece written, as the title suggests, for violin and continuo. Overton reduced the harpsichord part for harp and Thurber did the same with the violin part, perhaps inspired by an arrangement made by Serge Koussevitzky. The first mournful movement was intriguing for its reflection of the B section of the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from George Frederick Handel’s opera “Rinaldo,” which premiered nine years before Eccles’ 1720 publication of his sonatas. By contrast, the final movement was urgent and intense, with the harp standing out in splashes of brilliant color against the background pessimism of the bass.
Lark gave a solo rendition of the final movement from Eugene Ysaye’s fourth violin sonata, followed by the brief “Ysaye Shuffle,” a fiddle etude she composed based on the classical original. Fast and brilliantly technical, the sonata itself said a great deal without really saying anything — volume without content. The “Shuffle” was much more lively and approachable and required less complex fingering.
To wind up the first half of the show, the trio finished off with an impressive setting of Chick Corea’s “Spain” that sounded like a very convincing Spanish night at first before it detoured, breaking the spell of the surf on the sand below Sitges, to saunter into a cafe where the music was lively and the wine abundant. Gradually the listeners were drawn into a swishing dance with swirling skirts as they were pulled farther into the bar, the energy of the music built and the dance got wilder — until the whole thing slowed and petered out with a bit of vibrato. The musicians were having a blast with this one, treating it like a jam session.
Overton and Thurber restarted things after intermission with a Beatles tribute best described as a duet for plucked strings, a charming saunter with a sparkling role for the harp that ended in a fist bump. Lark then took over Thurber’s spot for an arrangement of the first movement from Astor Piazzola’s “Histoire du Tango.” The harp made a strong pairing with the violin here, especially given the melodic nature of the piece, which was lively, galloping, giddy and joyful and even tossed in a false ending for good measure.
Lark and Thurber also returned to their roots as a duo act with the first of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” with Thurber taking the left-hand part of what was originally written as a keyboard work and Lark taking the right. The combination was marvelously effective, as it allowed the listeners to hear the interplay of the phrasing within the work as one instrument would take up a passage and the other would echo it.
They followed it up with their own “Weathervane,” in which rambling, sustained notes emulated the creaking and sighing of the wind on a stormy day.
For their next to last selection, Overton picked Morgan Lewis’ jazz standard “How High the Moon,” kicking it off with a slow introduction while his colleagues played extreme high and low notes around the harp. Each of them then took over the theme that the harp had established, producing outstanding sustained harmonies in the process. And finally, Lark got daring and decided to sing for her supper as they finished up with their setting of Pete Seeger’s “Little Birdie,” the bird who flies high because he does not fear to die. Fast fingering on harp and violin, pulsing urgency in the bass and Lark’s yearning vocals produced another jamming rendition that Seeger himself would surely have enjoyed. A concert that ends with the musicians as happy as the audience is a concert that has lived up to humanity’s potential for artistic development.
Sedona Youth Orchestra
Prior to the concert, CMS artistic director Nick Canellakis and board of trustees president Brynn Burkee-Unger announced the relaunch of the Sedona Youth Orchestra in partnership with CMS and under the direction of Courtney Yeates and Kristina Beachell as part of CMS’ efforts to further music education in the community.
More than 50 students taking part in the orchestra and their parents were in attendance for the concert, and CMS had arranged for the visiting artists to work with those students in the classroom on the following day. Some of the youth orchestra’s more advanced students may also have the chance to perform with the Sedona Symphony at future concerts.
