Another Curtis Summerfest faculty concert

The marimba is easy to identify. It’s made out of wood and it frequently purveys music related to its Latin American roots. The rest of them? They all look like xylophones to me.

The last faculty concert at Curtis’s Summerfest included two pieces played on these contraptions and the musicians were kind enough to identify their instruments in the program. The Arx Duo played their first item on a marimba and their second on a vibraphone.

Percussion gets experimental

There was nothing about the marimba piece that suggested a conga line. Composer Nick Diberardino called it Particle Heuristics and it’s supposed to be about quantum mechanics and the way particles bounce around and sometimes line up in orderly fashion.

Diberardino could have called his piece a fantasy — the term Baroque composers used for a freeform piece that wanders from episode to episode according to its creator’s fancy. But you could also hear it as the dance of the particles, as intended. There were even times when it touched on the basic mystery at the heart of modern physics — the feeling that things don’t quite make sense when you start probing into the fundamental structure of the universe.

The vibraphone has electrically powered fans inside the resonating tubes located under the metal strips that produce the sound. The performer controls the speed of the vanes with a foot pedal and creates a distinctive pulsation. For Alyssa Weinberg’s Table Talk, the musicians conducted their conversation with a vibraphone, but the composer apparently opted not to use the vanes.

I heard Table Talk as an exploration of possibilities conducted by a young composer who just graduated from Curtis. There’s a passage, for example, in which one member of the duo pressed certain strips with his hands while his partner struck with her hammers.

It was an interesting exploration and the two pieces stimulated my own exploratory impulses. According to their website, Garrett Arney and Mari Yoshinaga formed the Arx Duo because they wanted to “forge new connections and artistic pathways — arcs" in the percussion chamber music genre. Their site contains a 25-minute video that’s a wonderful opportunity to observe percussion techniques close up.

Back to basics

The other items on the program were more conventional. Cellist Soo Bae played a long unaccompanied cello solo that combined emotional high points with virtuoso techniques like a passage in which she maintained a high pitched drone while she played the main melody line. Violist Toby Appel joined pianist Heather Conner in a transcript of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise that filled the hall with a long flow of beautiful viola sound.

For the finale, Bae and Appel joined violinist Steven Copes and pianist Amy Wang in a guaranteed can’t-miss closer — Brahms’ second piano quartet. Brahms was at his best, in my opinion, when he wrote anything that combined the piano with other instruments. He was a pianist himself and he knew the piece would be played by one of the great pianists of his era, the central romantic attachment of his life, Clara Schumann.