If at all possible, make time for Time for Three this Wednesday evening.
Tuesday night's concert by this trio at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center about as joyful a night of music as could be imagined.
That joy was the result was watching and hearing three exceptional musicians – violinists Zachary de Pue and Nicolas Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer – rip through music they obviously love to play, and to play with.
Everything that came from the three young men on the Williams Theater stage was performed with a kind of giddy exuberance, a gleeful sense of play. Whether charging through a rendition of the chestnut "Csardas" at bow-shredding speed, or deconstructing the Beatles' song "Blackbird" into a sparse, almost whispered melody over birdsong-like harmonics, Time for Three never played a rote note.
Bassist Meyer at one point described the group as "a classically trained garage band – except we don't rehearse in a garage." It's a clever line, but there is more than a grain of truth in it. Meyer, Kendall and de Pue are all phenomenal talents, graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and all have careers as soloists, orchestral and chamber musicians and composers, as well as backgrounds in other musical styles such as bluegrass and jazz.
But the Time for Three project is like their "after hours" gig – where they can cut loose, bringing everything they know and have learned to bear on music they love.
So they perform Bach's Concerto for Two Violins – but at breakneck speed, with a funky, pyrotechnical bass part that Johann Sebastian would never have dreamed of. They'll string together a couple of bluegrass classics, like the ageless "Turkey in the Straw" and Bill Monroe's "Jerusalem's Ridge," or tackle the ubiquitous "Orange Blossom Special," and fill these tunes with fillips and filigrees more worthy of a Paganini than a parking lot fiddler.
Even when they slow things down, their inventiveness in arrangements makes simple melodies like "Ashoken Farewell" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sound new, or gives a song like "Shenandoah" an edge, by mimicking the harsh, out-of-tune sound of a steamboat's whistle for the opening passage of this piece.
But where the group really excels is with the music that's been written for them, most of it by bassist Meyer. Meyer's compositions bring out the best in the trio – the mix of hymn-like chorale bookending a powerful, industrial core in "Of Time and Three Rivers," the logical flow from a kind of New Age airiness to a thorny "contemporary" section to high-powered bluegrass in the "Wyoming 307-Forget About It" medley, the Celtic-tinged romp of "Thunder Stomp."
Time for Three will perform at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 7, at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. For tickets call 596-7111.
