Time For Three, FVSO delivers a magical evening
Time For Three is boy-band-meets-classical-trio … and in the best possible way. Seriously talented musicians who never seem to take themselves too seriously but who never trivialize their gifts either.
Shortly after I met my wife we were in New York City and, perhaps thinking we were obliged as visitors to dine at a well-known restaurant, we headed out one evening toward Gramercy Tavern when we found ourselves instead walking through the door of a hole-in-the-wall Thai place.
Whether the food was that good or whether it was the fact that it felt like a more authentic NYC experience, whether it was the many dollars we saved or whether it was the sheer arbitrariness of our decision, we still talk about that dinner. We declared it at the time – perhaps not using the most precise language – serendipity. One of us, probably me, uttered a silly phrase that has stayed with us as a shared joke all these years: There’s no dipity like serendipity.
Serendipity, being what it is – random chance and circumstance that erupts into magic – we haven’t been blessed with too many other instances of it in the intervening years.
Then came Saturday night at the Fox Valley Symphony. My wife and I were tired and neither of us were quite sure even what the evening’s program was. Inertia and exhaustion were gaining the upper hand as six o’clock rolled around and we considered the comfort of the couch and the soothing pleasure of a Season 4 West Wing episode.
But we didn’t give in, ultimately choosing the symphony but with limited enthusiasm. After taking our seats we rifled through the FVSO program in search of the evening’s performance. Nothing. Someone around us mentioned that the evening was to be a surprise though they had heard that a trio called Time For Three would be accompanying the orchestra.
Some variation of the Three Tenors, maybe? I wondered.
After conductor Kevin Sutterlin led the orchestra in a brief but rousing opening number out rushed with a comical energetic flourish Time For Three – two violinists and a bassist. The next 90 minutes was a musical unicorn and a total surrender to joy. It wasn’t just their charm, humor and byplay, though that certainly was a prime ingredient in the magic that unfolded; it wasn’t just their virtuoso playing nor Charles Yang’s remarkably mellifluous vocals; it wasn’t just the mash-up of musical genres, from funk to classical to pop to soul to blues; it wasn’t just the magnificent songwriting skills of this Grammy-Award winning Philadelphia trio and it wasn’t just the lush accompaniment of the orchestra. It was all this plus the thrill of witnessing Maestro Sutterlin’s own near-giddy immersion into the experience.
Time For Three unleashed a lovely rendition of the pop classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You and moved on to a medley that began with a gorgeous Mahler adagio and morphed somehow into The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Who had that on their Bingo card? They played a haunting instrumental version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that concluded – if you can imagine – in Somewhere Over the Rainbow. They played several of their original songs, including an homage to Beethoven called Joy about a loner in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets who nonetheless sang “joy” into the world. There was an instrumental version of Bon Jovi’s Sweet Child of Mine.
And there was all the riffing and joking in between.
A bonus was when the group brought out nine young local musicians – The Nonets – to accompany them on their final number.
Time For Three is boy-band-meets-classical-trio … and in the best possible way. Seriously talented musicians who never seem to take themselves too seriously but who never trivialize their gifts either.
The entire evening was transporting. Going into the program completely blind freed us of expectations, making for an unfiltered, organic experience. That it was endlessly entertaining and beautiful only enriched it.
As ever, my wife and I left another FVSO performance feeling, if only for a short while, better about a world steeped in ugliness and madness. There is surely goodness in music and in musicians willing to devote themselves to delivering something so pure, so uplifting, so free of an alternate agenda.
On Saturday night, Time For Three, Kevin Sutterlin and the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra proved what my wife and I knew all long: Serendipity really is the best dipity!
