An Evening of Music -- Saltus Concert Society -- November 17, 1995 Besides putting its own music faculty on show, Saltus Concert Society reached out to other music schools on the Island for its latest Evening of Music held at Saltus Grammar School Hall on Friday evening. Joining them on the concert platform were teachers from the Bermuda Academy of Music, the Dunbarton School of Music and the Suzuki School of Music.

If the resulting programme was varied to the point of being almost fragmented, there was a compensating air of informality between artists who obviously enjoy making music together.

Over the years, the Saltus Concert Society has served as a useful showcase for talents which are more usually concerned with passing those talents on to others. These concerts remind us that the teachers are musicians, often very fine musicians, in their own right.

The Furness Line, a brass group consisting of Saltus brass teacher Alan Furness and his family, opened the proceedings with a William Walton March and then the world premiere of English composer Judith Bailey's "Jack Tar''.

Finding literal inspiration in the old Furness shipping line, this three-movement, but still short work, conjured up the echoes of sea shanties, horn pipes and even the evocative murmur of enveloping fog horns.

Saltus headmaster Trevor Rowell made his music bow in Bermuda by joining Ruth Henderson at the piano and Alan Furness on trumpet for a spirited rendition of Rachmaninoff's playful "Italian Polka''.

There were two Concert Pieces No. 2 by Mendelssohn, one in D minor, the other in F and both designed to highlight the beauty of the clarinet. Lisa Maule and Sally Dennis (with Ruth Henderson on piano) were certainly able to do this, both achieving a gorgeous clarity of tone in these melodious short works. The D minor, in particular, is imbued with lyricism, ending with a virtuosic allegro in the final movement.

It was good to see Ana Nunes Leite, who has recently returned to Bermuda after completing her Masters in piano performance, back on the concert stage. She was the accompanist for violinists Charles Li and Rosalind Watlington in the Handel Sonata in G minor, but she also took a more central role in Vivaldi's exquisitely beautiful Concerto in D major for Two Violins and Piano. Leite, Charles Li and Joan Stewart captured perfectly the crisp, propulsive pace of the baroque composer who apparently churned out more than 400 of these "lesser'' concertos in the course of his prolific musical career.

Susan LeVasseur is a mezzo soprano with a rich and very powerful voice of operatic proportions. She sang a set of Four French Songs (including two by Satie and Poulenc), which were vivacious in delivery but, in the absence of programme notes, it was difficult to fathom out their content.

Violinist Charles Li joined musical forces with Susan Soehner (also making her debut in this concert) on the piano for Beethoven's lovely and familiar Sonata in A major in which the lyricism hovers and expands through the slow second movement into the bright musical conversation of the concluding allegro piacevole .

Christina Li has an unexpectedly strong soprano voice which, at the same time, has a richly mellow quality in the lower register. She first chose two of her own compositions (with her husband Charles accompanying her on the guitar) which she described as "contemporary Christian''.

Last, but definitely not least, Saltus "old boy'' -- and almost certainly, the school's oldest musician -- Laurence Dill, made a now very infrequent but much appreciated appearance to accompany Mrs. Li in three of his own compositions. These were Three Bermuda Songs: "Consolation'', "Bermuda Calls'' and "Beautiful Isle of the Ocean''. The latter, with words written by a fellow Bermudian during the First World War and set to music by Mr. Dill in 1983, is the nostalgic reverie of an exiled soldier who thinks longingly of his island home.

Laurence Dill's works brought a sentimental and -- very rare, this -- a Bermudian ending to a fine classical concert.

-- Patricia Calnan