Time for Three is certainly not your traditional string trio.
The instrumentation, for example, is two violins and a double bass. They're all classically trained — two original members, violinist Nicolas "Nick" Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer, are products of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Their more recent "acquisition" (four years ago), violinist Charles Yang, is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music in New York.
The music they make, however, goes all over the musical map, starting and often based on classical, and some of them composed specifically for them, but also ranging into Americana, pop, jazz, bluegrass and hip-hop. The group previously has referred to itself as a "classically trained garage band."
Original violinist and Curtis alumnus Zachary DePue left the "band" in 2015.
"He's a dear friend of ours and we actually play together every once in a while," Kendall says, "but he just wanted to change careers and he hated the road. It happens.
"I've known about Charles for a while. Just like Ranaan and I were doing at Curtis, he was doing almost the same thing at Juilliard — studying with [former New York Philharmonic concertmaster] Glenn Dicterow, then doing all these wild interpretations on the violin of pop tunes, going into the streets and playing music games with people walking by. So inventive and creative and way outside the box. Still a wicked violinist.
"We asked him if he wanted to join the band. We got together over two days around a fire, played a lot of music but also talked a lot, and we realized we're totally on the same page. And it's been amazing."
"The band before Charles started was purely instrumental, we did a thing of taking what's popular now, then pairing it with our favorites in the core classical rep, as a way of being a bridge for a more broad audience, into experiences that we love. When Charles joined, it was less about interpreting other people's music and more of a real direct focus on us writing original material.
"We're actually songwriting. Charles has an incredible voice, and we've been writing with Liz Rose," a Grammy-winning songwriter with whom they are working on a new recording set to come out this year through Warner Music. "She wrote with Taylor Swift a long time ago, but this sounds nothing like Nashville and nothing like country; it's singer-songwriter stuff that's original to us.
"We'll probably play a couple of our original songs afterward," by way of an encore, he adds.
"On the other side of it, we're continuing on the path we love very much, of master composers of the core classical world, living composers writing original concertos for us." That includes Jennifer Higdon's Concerto 4-3, which they're playing this weekend with the Arkansas Symphony and guest conductor JoAnn Falletta.
Higdon, he says, is "highly decorated, but none of that matters to us. She has a real voice; she's from Tennessee and the piece we're playing celebrates Americana, specifically bluegrass and folk but within her own voice." It's a link, he adds, to "what it means to be classically trained, but to be an artist who lives in today's reality; it's about making authentic connections. Not only playing the music we got from the past."
They're also collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts on a concerto that the San Francisco Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra will premiere next summer.
Style on 09/24/2019