‘Contact,’ Rachmaninoff on tap for weekend – JH News&Guide
The Grand Teton Festival Orchestra and the trio Time for Three — Nick Kendall and Charles Yang, violins, and Ranaan Meyer, bass — will gather Friday and Saturday evening at Walk Festival Hall in Teton Village to share their collective vision of the work. Guest conductor Kevin John Edusei also will lead the orchestra in Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3.
What with a shortage of repertoire for two violins and bass — especially for a trio that improvises as it performs, blending in jazz and blues and bluegrass, and even song and vocalizes as they play — Time for Three leverages its reputation for innovative, quality music-making to get composers to write for them.
They reached out to Puts in 2017 with the idea of his writing a concerto for them.
“Kevin really studied us,” Young told the News&Guide last month, “came to many of our shows, just trying to see what we were, what kind of group he was writing for.”
Puts wrote, “[A]fter hearing them play, sing, improvise and perform their own arrangements and compositions … I felt both elated — by the infectious energy and joy they exude as performers — and also rather daunted by the thought.”
…The resulting album, “Letter for the Future” (2022), won the 2023 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo and Puts’ composition won Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Also on the program are Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture (1807), written for a performance of a play based on Shakespeare’s tragedy “Coriolanus,” and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3. Written in 1934, nearly 30 years after his second symphony, this late work was largely dismissed during Rachmaninoff’s lifetime, but found favor with orchestras and conductors some decades later.