Sybarite5 (1/31/16)

Thanks, once again, to a Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert (great series, by the way), I heard Sybarite5 play some very eclectic music. I took only a few notes, since the hall was completely darkened. As a result, I went to their website to get a playlist of the concert. My scribbled notes were pretty darn close, in terms of the titles, though.

Weird Fishes – Radiohead; Black Bend – Dan Visconti; Getting Home (…I
Must Be) – Jessica Meyer; Yann’s Flight – Shawn Conley; Paranoid Android – Radiohead (arr. Kim); Muerte del Angel – Astor Piazzolla (arr. Bragato/
syb5); Elegy – Edward Elgar; Groove Machine – Marc Mellits; Two Armenian Folk Songs – Komitas; No Surprises – Radiohead; Turceasca – Taraf de Haidouks (arr. Matt Van Brink); and, as an encore, Escuela – Piazzolla (arr. Bragato/syb5)

Um, ’Meister, who (or what) is Sybarite5? Ah, yes. They are a string quintet—the usual suspects, violins, Sami Merdinian and Sarah Whitney; viola,
Angela Pickett; cello, Laura Metcalf; with bass, Louis Levitt added into the mix. The first piece had driving jazz rhythms to begin with that were interesting but eventually ended up meandering. Maybe I’m just not a Radiohead fan. It turns out that that was true. I really wasn’t all that moved by any of the Radiohead songs throughout the afternoon.

In fact, very little of the music had much of an effect on me such that I can comment on it a week and a half later, though I distinctly remember wanting to like the Elgar more than I did. Piazzolla is a composer I am more familiar with than most on the program, and I enjoyed those pieces a little bit more than some of the others. All five players were really good, and they had a great rapport. And adding a bass to your standard string quartet gave a nice bit of oomph. As some of their promotional copy ran, this is “not your grandparents’ chamber music.” The two Armenian folk songs had some pleasant charm, and I liked the encore, probably because it was also Piazzolla.

Sybarite5 is not exactly my cup of tea, but they were enthusiastically received by the almost completely full audience. And the hall, the Dr. S. Steven Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library, is a gem of a theater, with comfortable seating, including ample leg room. An enjoyable concert in a truly enjoyable space, marred only by two different cell phones going off at two different times.

Concertmeister