Clarinet and bass clarinet blend with a trio of strings; lines are punctuated with guitar and mandolin.
Backed by a rock band merged with a trio of strings, his songs move from chamber-music delicacy to two-chord stomps, and they can be stubbornly cathartic.
The musical setting begins with a bare-bones chant and then grows ornate, with a trio of strings supplying more of a classical stamp than anything else in the cycle.
He's joined by a puckish clarinet player echoing his top line, then a ragtag family of musicians gathers; a trio of strident strings in party frocks, longhair electric guitarists, indie banjo players, a wild west villain with an accordion and a jigging violinist in a deerstalker whom Zimmer, he'll later explain, stole from Ennio Morricone.
Three successive Friday nights are devoted to chamber music, both innovative and traditional, in concerts by a trio of topnotch young string ensembles: the Linden String Quartet (with the composer-vocalist Gabriel Kahane, July 13), Brooklyn Rider (July 20), and the Pacifica Quartet (July 27).
Four decades later (same suite) - the steamy couple is surrounded in a clutter of toy blocks, a miniature drum set and trio of strings is playing hide-and-seek with the bass who is peering out from the wardrobe, a teddy bear stretches a timeout with a tiny upright as the French horn scoots past with a pull-along yellow duckie.
An improbably effective trio of strings started it off: the Senegalese kora player Abdou M'Boup, the Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, and the American jazz violinist Regina Carter all blended, with the kora determining rhythm and scale, the pipa layering scratchy excitable figurations and the violin adding flowing Coplandesque lines.
Even the flying is achieved through palpable "fairy strings" and a trio of professional counterweighters on stage-side ladders.
One of the most obvious examples of what Rolling Stone magazine's album reviewer later termed "the music of mountain tops and vast horizons", "Isn't It a Pity" featured the largest line-up of musicians found on the album – including three or four keyboard players, a trio of extra rhythm guitarists, the orchestral strings, brass and tympani, and a male choir.
In the sculptural "I Am" (1994), she depicts herself -- as usual, unflatteringly -- as a trio of three-dimensional paper heads hanging from strings, like lanterns or souvenirs of a guillotine.
| April 13 at 5: Over at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the Orion String Quartet offers a trio of Beethoven quartets (including Op. 130, in B-Flat Major, with the "Grosse Fuge") to celebrate its twentieth anniversary.
