Pine Plains, N.Y. — Clarion Concerts’ Leaf Peeper Concert Series presents violinist Tessa Lark and double bassist Michael Thurber in a virtual concert that will stream from clarionconcerts.org Saturday, Oct. 10, at 5 p.m. for a suggested donation of $20. This return performance, featuring the duo’s distinctive folk-classical repertoire, will be shot with no audience at the Stissing Center by a crack team of five videographers and one celebrated audio engineer.
Lark and Thurber‘s program includes, as advertised, Bach, blues, jazz and bluegrass. But it’s their original material that best showcases their ability to straddle the line between two musical worlds and make every note sound comfortably inevitable. The light-hearted “Tumble Time,” for just a single example, strikes a convincing and enjoyable balance between two traditions. And one can’t help noticing on a piece like this that the players’ chops don’t falter when the going gets tough, with styles colliding right and left. They have a way of making all those styles sound like they have always been one.
That Lark and Thurber are wife and husband may seem irrelevant, but their music constitutes not merely a blending of two disparate musical traditions but a marriage of classical and folk sensibilities. You can hear it in the give and take of contrasting modes and gestures.
When was the last time you heard a classically trained violinist perform one of the standard bluegrass showstoppers — say, “Orange Blossom Special”? Violinists who excel in both classical and bluegrass are as scarce as duck incisors. Sure, any professional orchestral violinist can sight-read a transcribed bluegrass fiddle part and make it sound nearly perfectly authentic. But that’s not how traditional bluegrass fiddle solos are created. Bluegrass, like jazz, is a living thing, created in real time by musicians who may or may not read classical music notation at all. Do you think Vassar Clements got his solos from the printed page? Hardly! He got all his licks from “the gettin’ place,” as it is known to Nashville pickers. And that’s where Tessa Lark got hers. Whether she commits her fiddle solos to paper or not is beside the point, because she mastered bluegrass first.
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A performance like this could be shot with two or three cameras, and it would look fine. But Clarion engaged a five-camera crew for this shoot. Expect a very high-quality product. Donate whatever you can.
