STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAKE3 and THE ARGYROS
Get ready for a mashup of Bach with “Amazing Grace,” “Carmen” with imaginary dragons, jamming to oldies like Billy Joel and the Beatles and a very energetic take on popular movie and TV tunes when Take3 comes to town.
The trio will bring their mish mash of classical, country and rock and roll to The Argyros in Ketchum at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 9. Tickets are $20, available at https://theargyros.org/
“We’re going to have a blast, that’s for sure!” said Lindsay Deutsch who plays an 1845 Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume violin. “Our show has a little bit of everything.”
Deutsch, who started Take3 in 2017, has performed with orchestras in most of the 50 U.S. states, recorded tracks for film and television, performed on a Celebrity cruise through the Caribbean and West Indies and recorded a Christmas Album featuring “O Holy Night” mashed up with Bach.
She is also featured as a violin soloist on the theme to the popular “Netflix series “The Witcher.”
Her colleagues include pianist Jason Stoll, a Julliard musician who has performed at the Aspen Music Festival and Pianofest in the Hamptons, and cellist Mikala Schmitz, who has performed with the English rock group The Last Shadow Puppets and Tim Robbins’s troupe The Actors Gang.
Deutsch’s destiny as a violinist was set when she saw Itzhak Perlman on “Sesame Street” as a 2-year-old.
“Finally, when I was 5, I received my first violin. It was all Bach, Brahms and Beethoven for me from then until my late 20’s…until I started touring with Yanni.”
Deutsch’s tours with Yanni, a Greek-American pianist and composer known for blending jazz, classical, soft rock and world music, through North America, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Abu Dhabi, proved as life changing as that “Sesame Street” episode with Itzhak Perlman.
“I had three weeks to prep all of Yanni’s music as his violinist had dropped out of the band,” Deutsch recounted. “When I arrived, I was so green, never having plugged in the violin before, not having ever used in-ear monitors. The evening of the first show, the sound of the crowd was so loud I actually thought my in-ear monitors were malfunctioning. Upon realizing it was the roar of the crowd I was hearing, and not feedback from the monitors, I was completely hooked. It was so completely different from the demure classical audiences I had been playing for.”
Deutsch wrote out her ideas for what would eventually become Take3 on the plane home from her first show with Yanni in Saudi Arabia.
“Mixing pop and classical and creating fun mashups with multiple genres was where my heart was,” she said.
Maestro Jung-Ho Pak, of the Cape Symphony Orchestra, has praised Deutsch’s vision: “A conductor dreams about finding a soloist who understands the essential responsibility of helping change a large community’s view of classical music. In a time when every concert has to be unforgettable and a game changer, Lindsay can make that happen every time.”
Deutsch takes his words to heart.
“Classical music is certainly in danger of becoming an art form of the past,” she said. “Everything about it is rooted in tradition from the music written hundreds of years ago, to the instruments created hundreds of years ago. It seems technology is pushing society farther and farther ahead at breakneck speed. That’s exciting in many ways, but tradition feels harder and harder to hang on to. I think a repackaging, so to speak, can make this art form exciting even for the most modern audiences. Take3 aims to do that.”