Concert review: Maya Anjali Buchanan (violin) Romain-Olivier Gray (cello) Hao Yang (guitar)

For a sold-out crowd in the intimate Field Concert Hall, the Curtis Institute of Music presented three alumni in a summery menu to mark America’s 250th birthday.

Romain-Olivier Gray – who participated in this year’s Queen Elisabeth Competition – began with Lamentations: Black/Folk Song Suite by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, underlining its bluesy strains with beautiful tone.

He continued with Julie-O, written by Mark Summer of the Turtle Island Quartet, and deftly captured its echoes of Appalachian fiddling. He also nailed the ‘ghost bowing’ sequences, and another of the work’s innovations – a series of three plucked harmonics.

For the evening’s middle section, guitarist Hao Yang chose three Gershwin arrangements, Always and Forever by Pat Metheny, and ‘Milwaukee’, an excerpt from Benjamin Verdery’s Some Towns and Cities. Her choices, done with tight focus, brought the house down.

Violinist Maya Anjali Buchanan – stepping in at the last minute for an indisposed Elissa Lee Koljonen – concluded the party with Darshan by Reena Esmail, an engrossing hybrid of Hindustani and Western techniques. Buchanan offered rapt focus, sending Esmail’s melodies soaring. She followed this with Mark O’Connor’s Strings and Threads Suite, originally for violin and guitar, and overflowing with echoes of American fiddling techniques.

To conclude the concert, all three musicians united for Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion; here the trio’s soulful evocation was pitch perfect for a relaxing July evening.

Bruce Hodges