Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


Our neighborhood can be proud of its musical heritage; with at least two venues unique to the US. We spoke last month of Peoples Symphony Concerts. Slightly older, founded in 1894, is the Third Street Music School Settlement, now at 235 East 11th Street, just west of 2nd Avenue. This is the oldest community school of the arts in the US, not just for music but also dance, visual arts instruction and early childhood training. Its faculty of more than 125 teaching artists share a commitment to excellence and professionalism, and many possess advanced degrees from the world's leading conservatories and art schools. With training ranging from Western classical music to jazz, rock and beyond, many are actively pursuing their performing and composing careers.



As part of the mid-19th century settlement movement , transplanted from Great Britain, young university graduates "settled" in New York's poor and immigrant communities, to improve the children’s quality of life, Third Street originally employed live-in social workers who gave baths to the children along with their musical lessons.. Third Street still serves a large immigrant community, and nearly 75% of its 4,000 annual students receive some sort of financial assistance or subsidized tuition, both at the main school and through its public school partnerships.



Most fun for the community are the 250 free-to-the public performances that the faculty, guest artists and students offer each year. The concerts take place in the small auditorium, with a little group of portable chairs in the center, and a red carpet-covered arena of some five rows of informal seating along the walls, holding an estimated 150 attendees. The room is dominated by two massive Steinway concert grand pianos.



We attended one of the most enjoyable piano concerts in the Artist Performance Series 2009-10, scheduled for every Friday, at 7:30 PM, from October through May. Our starting performer was Rosemary Caviglia, chair of the Piano department, and a life-long student of J. S. Bach’s

keyboard works, who gave a bravura rendition of his Italian Concerto that tested the acoustics of the room, much affected by the heating and ventilation devices in its ceiling. . Dr. Caviglia continued with Frederic Chopin’s Ballade No.3 in A-flat Major, which she explained to the Suzuki-trained youth part of the audience as a musical fairytale, and rendered it with a much softer musical palette.



The stars for the adult audience, though, were Esther Lee Kaplan and Margaret Mills, a virtuoso piano duo that played a transcription of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse for two pianos, written by the composer. If you do not remember La Valse, it is composed to be like a Viennese waltz but faster, with a very nervous undertone, producing an image of dancers performing in a hurry, while checking their watches. In the two-piano version these images are exaggerated even more, with the two pianos creating a fast-running fog of sounds, minor ranges building the undertone of despair. From this miasma the waltz theme emerges, clarifying slowly but surely, to end on the same tone of despair. Sitting practically on top of the pianos, the listener /watcher gets a marvelous perspective that his counterpart in a concert hall is denied. You see the theme player, Esther Lee Kaplan, stressed but steady, moving forward with the main score, while Margaret Mills, the sure-handed support, fills in with glissandos, rapid music sequences and barrages of notes, hardly seeing Esther Lee but anticipating her precise placements and never failing, in those 1/100 of a second matched moves. It is an audio/visual thrill, like watching a perfect sports event. I am not sure which sports analogy fits, maybe a Jeeter double-play repeated over and over, or a beach volleyball game, where the slammer rises at the perfect moment and place , anticipating a perfectly posited ball. Ladies, you should really make a close-up video!



We have heard the two concert pianists for years, both as parents of a student and students ourselves, and the thrill persists. This is not to minimize the solo performance of Esther Lee Kaplan, who started the after-intermission concert part with three fiery mazurkas by Chopin, Ops 17, 24 and 7, her soft touch and deft control presenting no endangerment to the ceiling fixtures. She sowed pearls of music in renditions of Chopin's Waltz in E-minor (posthumous) and Polonaise No.2 in E-major by Frederic Liszt, another master of the outer parameters of the instrument.



If this endorsement of Third Street concerts as sports events has reached you, consider the balance of the free (repeat, free) Artist Performance Series 2009-10:

12/11 Sibylle Johner, cello, and the Damocles Trio; 12/18 Tatyana Sirota, piano; 1/8 Marc Ponthus, piano; 1/15 Jose Pietri-Coimbra, violin/voice, with Francisco Miranda and Michiyo Morikawa, piano: 1/22 Shanda Wooley, cello and Frederica Wyman/Nathaniel LaNasa, piano; 1/29 Amelia Hollander violin and Sasha Papernik piano et al; 2/5 Chamber Music faculty; 2/12 Nnenna Ogwo, piano; 2/19 Nadav Lev, guitar; 2/26 Lee Feldman, Eddy Kronengold and Elinor Amlen, piano and voice; 3/5 Susan Friedlander, flute, et al; 3/12 New Music faculty perform 20th/21st century music; 3/19 Hugh Sam, piano, also Mary Lou Francis, Margaret Mills (you know that name!), singers and strings: 3/26 Roger Peltzman, piano, et al; 4/9 Noel Kirkwood, piano and composition; 4/16 Vanessa Fadial and friends, piano; 4/23 David Moreno, guitar et al; Art Show opening; 4/30 Paul Shaw, piano; 5/7 Maureen McDermott, cello and Anne-Marie McDermott, piano