Friday night was a homecoming of sorts for David Starobin and Patrick Mason.
Two highly distinguished alumni of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins, guitarist Starobin and baritone Mason have won everything from Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Career Grant to a shiny Grammy statue.
Scholars as well as performers, Starobin teaches at the Curtis Institute and the Manhattan School of Music, where he's held the coveted Andres Segovia Chair. Mason is an endowed fellow, too, at the University of Colorado-Boulder and works with budding stage composers each summer at the John Duffy Composers Institute.
But perhaps most importantly, since leaving Baltimore, David Starobin and Patrick Mason have gone on to become first-call interpreters of many of this country's foremost contemporary composers: George Crumb, Gunther Schuller, Paul Lansky, the late Elliott Carter, the late Milton Babbitt (to name but a few).
And yet, as the intimate crowd swaddled in An die Musik's heavenly chairs was to hear, Friday's concert played surprisingly heavy on classics like Schubert, Paganini and Fernando Sor.
Starobin opened with two expertly wrought solo Sor études, and Mason soon joined for two more of Sor's patented bawdy songs, "Las Mujeres y Cuerdas" and "Muchacha y la Verguenza." The latter, a fantastic tale of youthful indiscretion blamed on a cockroach, was particularly well-received.
Mason exited, and the rest of the first half belonged to Starobin. Niccolò Paganini's virtuosic works for violin are notoriously difficult--some may argue dangerous, even--to play. Lesser-known, though no less easier to execute, is his body of work for solo guitar. Starobin pieced together three such works in a makeshift sonatina that, while perhaps a bit formally suspect, dazzled nonetheless.
Starobin then took us to intermission with a new, compelling composition of his own, 2010's Variations on a Theme by Carl Nielsen. While detuning his top E string a whole step lower, Starobin told of his long association with Nielsen's home country of Denmark.
He likened Nielsen to our own Stephen Foster, and I'd add that where it not for Starobin, Poul Ruders--the Danes' most decorated living composer--probably wouldn't be as successful. The Starobin/Ruders coupling has proven quite a bountiful one for new guitar music, and proving that theirs is a two way street, Starobin's Variations found gestures à la Ruders used to explore Nielsen's original folk theme.
It was an ecstasy of influence, indeed.
Patrick Mason returned for what was to be the evening's highlight--John Musto's stark, but gorgeous The Brief Light. Finished almost two years ago now, Starobin and Mason have recorded the work for the guitarist's Bridge label, but Friday was the first time the duo had played it live.
True to the recording, Musto's deft settings of James Laughlin's six lyrics did not disappoint in concert. Mason handled the thorny, often disjointed melodies with great aplomb; Starobin's plucked harmonics added a ghostly luster during the title movement.
"I loved you as I never loved before / but now the ancient sea has carried me away," sang Mason in the piece's final couplet. Here's hoping future audiences outside Baltimore get to hear this fragile, yet remarkable work in person.
To do so otherwise would be the real disappointment here.
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