Just Some Songs at Twilight

THE MAVERICK CHAMBER ORCHESTRA CONCERT is an annual event that recently welcomed the Caroga Arts Ensemble as its resident ensemble, a fitting acknowledgment of the quality of music-making going on in New York’s Fulton County each summer. The Maverick Concert Hall itself is in Woodstock (or Hurley, depending on your geographic preference), about a hundred miles south of Caroga Lake. The rustic hall in which the concerts take place was built in 1916, from an era in the area’s history when music and art and love were celebrated with no inkling  that another type of music festival, decades later, would put Woodstock on the map.

Photo courtesy Maverick Concerts

Saturday, August 23 was as perfect a day as you could desire in the middle of summer, which added to the fairy-tale aspect of this event. With its vaulted ceiling and decorative windows, the concert hall is a chapel where the faithful assemble to worship good music, a reasonable object of veneration. 

Seating is on padded benches arrayed in rows, flanked by lines of similar benches along the side walls. The large rear doors open onto a contained area with several more padded benches and, as I learned from arriving early enough to witness some rehearsal, there’s no compromise of the sound and the view. 

The hall was sold out for this concert, and that included the outdoor seating. While the second-half feature, Philip Glass’s Piano Concerto No. 3, performed by Simone Dinnerstein, was the draw, let’s wait to assess it. There’s a remarkable first half to consider.

Maverick music director Alexander Platt welcomed the crowd and introduced the program with as informative yet succinct speech as I’ve heard in such circumstances, then Platt took his position in front of the assembled orchestra to conduct this half of the program. Sixteen string players comprised the ensemble, with the chops to conquer the difficult program ahead.

It began with Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, also known as the Basle Concerto, written in 1946 at the request of Paul Sacher for his Basler Kammerorchester. We find the composer solidly in his neo-classical period, with a well-structured three-movement work that sounds like nobody but Stravinsky. 

The opening Vivace often sounds like a polka danced on three legs as it moves between time signatures of 6/8 and 9/8 with the occasional 4/4 or 2/4 thrown in for – I’ll have to say good measure. Lively and witty, with moments of unsettling calm, it gives way to a brief second movement, marked Arioso-Andantino, in which a three-beat figures are placed in a 4/4 frame to keep us off-kilter, even as it evokes a strange feeling of lushness.

The brief concluding Rondo-Allegro sets the strings buzzing with relentless tremolo work, suddenly dancing up and down the higher strings as the cellos and basses suggest melodic legato moments. Extremely virtuosic playing combined with the wonderful acoustics of the hall to deliver something unexpectedly outstanding. I’ve seen this decried as one of Stravinsky’s lesser works. Clearly, those know-it-alls have never experienced the piece in this environment with these players and conductor.

Alexander Platt
Photo courtesy Maverick Concerts

It takes audacity to title your work “Adagio for Strings,” what with the spirit of Samuel Barber’s so-named piece hanging over you, but Robert Manno’s audacity was justified by the appeal of his work, written in 2004. High trills, spreading through the orchestra, begin the brief-ish journey. A trill, which is the rapid alternation of two neighboring notes, is an indeterminate sound, pointing to no comfortable tonal harbor (we’ll examine this again below). But soon the cellos confess a melody – this is a very tuneful work – that is taken over by the violins, all of it pulling you in by a delayed sense of resolution. There’s melody here, but there’s also motion. Textural nuances were well summoned: like Stravinsky, Manno calls for a string quartet to sound against the orchestra. The music swells; there’s a conciliatory thought; and then an endearing finish underscored by pizzicato bass notes. 

Benjamin Britten’s “Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge” paid tribute to an English composer with whom he studied from 1927 until 1939; taking a theme from Bridge’s “Three Idylls” for string quartet. The work was commissioned by Salzburg Festival in 1937 (the last before Hitler invaded Austria) and became one of Britten’s early successes.

After an introduction and statement of the theme, ten variations follow that range from the impish to the savage to the melancholy – it’s quite a gamut. Hints of Shostakovich and Schoenberg peek through, but it’s definitely the work of a composer who has found his voice.  Platt conducted the ensemble with assurance and panache.

The sky was bleeding twilight as the second half began. Glass wrote the concerto on commission from a dozen performing groups (I can’t imagine his work comes cheap), but it was written specifically for Dinnerstein after the composer was knocked over by her playing. The pianist conducted the Caroga ensemble from the keyboard, necessitating her to face upstage. I can’t say that’s a bad thing, as I’m weary of hearing judgments about soloists derived more from their facial expressions than their playing.

The concerto is in three movements, with no tempo indications. It begins with solo piano, with the left hand arpeggiating in three while the right hand established a syncopated pattern of chords that would underlie much of what follows. Stravinsky’s Concerto in D prepared our ears for this, especially when the cellos entered to suggest a melodic phrase.

I’m hearing a mellower, more rhapsodic Glass here, but it’s still clothed with his familiar arpeggiations and other repetitive techniques. Mid-movement, the piano begins a three-up, three-down arpeggio that’s a bulwark of classical-era string playing, and, sure enough, the strings grabbed for some loud, excited moments. The piano, again solo, ended the movement as quietly as it began, its resolution more a matter of emotion than a tonic chord.

The second movement sets up a more contained chord sequence, which actually serves to heighten its emotional effect. Don’t ask me how. It’s Glass’s specialty. A falling-octaves piano passage bridge discrete sections of the movement, each with its own subtly different personality. There’s always a sense of Bach behind the gestures, but at one point, the piano rocks into a Rachmaninoff-esque series of stately chords against four-beat string arpeggios before the piano persuades the group back to the familiar three-beat pattern.

There’s another gentle solo-piano finish, although Movement III seems to pick up where the other left off. But we’ve come back to the more expansive emotional world of the first movement. Here a gentle ostinato dominates, music in the manner of the trill described above. The more widely separated ostinato components aren’t as plangent as a trill, but they still urge some manner of release. This, the longest movement of the three, demands what the first two movements merely suggest: surrender. 

By the time you reach the subdued finish, you feel as if you’ve been on a more active journey than a seat on a bench would suggest. Dinnerstein’s phrasing is full of life, skillfully employing rubato to liven the architecture of the piece, which brought a delighted audience to its feet.

The Maverick Chamber Orchestra Concert
with the Caroga Arts Ensemble, Kyle Price, director
Alexander Platt, conductor
Simone Dinnerstein, pianist
Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, NY
August 23, 2025