A constant communion

Time for Three brings passion, artistry to Wharton Center

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A live concert by string trio Time for Three is more than an evening of music. Watching and listening to Charles Yang (violin/vocals), Nicolas Kendall (violin/vocals) and Ranaan Meyer (double bass/vocals) play together is like witnessing a fusion of three souls, a constant communion.

“As soon as we start playing, we just lean into one another’s sound and spin this energy between the three of us out into, and with, the audience,” Kendall said.

All three musicians are virtuosi, and eclectic ones at that. They play pop songs, classical concertos, jazz grooves, bluegrass, pretty much anything — except what you expect them to play.

“The way we shape our sound, the way we phrase, is exactly the way we would play a Brahms sonata, a Beethoven quartet or Haydn,” Kendall explained. “But we are not a classical band at all.”

Composers write music for the three of them as if they were one person. One of the two classical Grammys they won in 2023 was for best instrumental solo, despite their three heads and six legs.

The trio’s breakout radio hit, “Vertigo,” written for them by genre-crossing composer Steve Hackman, surfs on dark ripples of emotional trauma. On the recording, a throbbing synthesizer pushes Yang to bare his soul in a gentle, yearning voice. When they perform “Vertigo” live, all three players take flight, plucking and bowing their hearts out, exposing every nerve of the song while supporting Yang with an almost therapeutic cushion of vocal harmony.

Their mutual love and support are a wonder to behold.

“No matter how crazy our musical lives are or how many other things we’re doing, there’s such a generosity of spirit between Ranaan, Charles and myself,” Kendall said.

The trio’s self-composed pop song “Deanna” begins with wordless singing and melts into high-register violin and low cello sighs, revealing hidden wavelengths of emotion that vibrate above and below the “visible” ones in the lyrics.

“There’s a singer-songwriter quality to some of our songs,” Kendall said. “We’ll do our own arrangements and covers of some of the most famous pop songs out there.”

The signature achievement of the group’s career so far is “Contact,” a brilliant and moving concerto written for them by composer Kevin Puts (a native of Alma) that won a Grammy for best contemporary classical composition.

“Contact” goes for the jugular from the first note, with a simple, keening signal that Kendall admitted is a “real earworm,” a pleading signal from the human race to the vast universe that gave it birth.

Puts wanted the music to tap directly into the trio’s boundless energy, leaving room for spontaneous creation at each performance.

The concerto has profound moments of mystery, wonder and doubt, ending in an ecstatic spiral of energy propelled by the electromagnetic affinity among the three soloists at its nucleus.

“It’s a tailor-made suit just for us,” Kendall said. “He spent a lot of time figuring us out, what our strengths are — not just on our instruments but the X factor when people come hear us live.”

The “signal” theme took on more significance when the pandemic shut down planned premieres of the concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.

“We had a chance to go even deeper with it,” Kendall said. “We weren’t able to be in contact with each other. As a whole world, we were feeling so apart and distant, when we feel like there’s such a common bond.”

They began to shape “a simple three-part harmony that could be like a message sent out into space for future generations to learn about what’s happening right now, but it’s also about optimism for the future. It’s a piece of genius, and it’s part of our main repertoire now.”

None of them envisioned a Grammy-winning masterpiece on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label in 2009, when Kendall, Meyer and violinist Zachary DePue were studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

As legend has it, Meyer and DePue were playing in the Philadelphia Orchestra one night when a storm killed the lights, so they started jamming on folk tunes in the dark. While taking their classical training seriously, Meyer was also into jazz, and the other two loved bluegrass music.

When DePue left the group in 2015 to become concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony, Yang took his place. Yang’s lemony-sweet vocals, formidable violin chops and stage charisma pushed the group further into the stratosphere.

“We never thought that two violins and a double bass, mixed with three vocals, would be our career,” Kendall said.

The combination looked unlikely on paper, but the trio’s tireless energy, transcendent rapport and eagerness to play new music from multiple genres dovetailed perfectly with the changes rippling through the post-pandemic classical music industry.

As venues like the Wharton Center and orchestras across the nation push to broaden their classical audiences and diversify their musical offerings, Kendall’s new problem is tearing himself away from countless emails and other demands and getting back to playing music.

“Winning two Grammys — that recognition has helped us raise the flag,” Kendall said. “We don’t feel as if we’re swimming upstream as far as the industry is concerned. The people who are booking or making artistic decisions with orchestras, they get it. The industry has shown that it needs to be more progressive, more open to the world.”

The challenge now, Kendall said, is to persuade people who are unfamiliar with classical music to give Time for Three a try and to persuade classical music lovers to relax and experience a thrilling and different take on some familiar instruments.

“The thing that’s hard is that audiences still don’t know exactly what to expect from us,” Kendall said. “The way you feel us, the way we craft our sound in a live situation, it just doesn’t come across in any recorded medium.”

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