SPA Trio's concert Wednesday at Norton will evoke sounds, songs of the bygone salon

It’s December 1916 in Palm Beach, and the leading lights of American society have gathered at The Breakers to escape the chill up north.

Over in Europe, a great war has been raging for two years now, and there’s talk that newly re-elected President Woodrow Wilson may soon call on the United States to enter the conflict. But Breakers guests are eager to forget all that unpleasantness, and many of them have repaired to one of the rooms downstairs for a concert of beautiful songs that will help them do just that.

The kind of program they might have heard that day will return Wednesday evening to South Florida, when a threesome of eminent classical musicians gives a concert called "Songs of the Salon" for the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach.

The SPA Trio, which takes its name from the first names of its members — soprano Susanna Phillips, violist Paul Neubauer and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott — have programmed a four-part recital of songs primarily from the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, pieces that straddled the line between art song and popular parlor tunes.

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The trio brings real star power to this repertoire. Phillips is a veteran of the Metropolitan Opera stage, having sung there for 12 seasons in roles from Musetta in "La Bohème" to Donna Elvira in Mozart’s "Don Giovanni." This season, she returns to "Bohème," but this time as Mimí, the doomed heroine of Puccini’s immensely popular opera.

Neubauer became principal violist of the New York Philharmonic at age 21, and has pursued a wide-ranging career as a solo violist and recording artist; two of his records have been nominated for Grammy awards. Highlights of his work in recent years includes the U.S. premiere of a hitherto lost short work for viola by the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich, and a recording of a viola concerto written for him by the contemporary American composer Aaron Jay Kernis.

McDermott is one of the finest pianists of her generation, a performer whose repertoire ranges widely from Baroque to contemporary music. A member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she also directs the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival in Key Largo. Her recordings include an ongoing series of Mozart piano concertos, the complete piano sonatas of Prokofiev, and the complete works for piano and orchestra by George Gershwin.

“This performance has been a long time in the making, with a few setbacks along the way, but I am confident that our audience will feel it was very much worth the wait and find it to be a unique and refreshing experience,” said Ahmad Mayes, the society’s executive director, in a prepared statement.

While the songs on Wednesday’s program were written to be sung by a single voice accompanied by the piano, the practice of adding an extra “obbligato” instrument to such performances dates back centuries. Neubauer’s viola will be heard not just accompanying the songs, but as a solo instrument in a “Romance” for viola and piano written in 1905 by the English composer Benjamin Dale.

The concert will open with a group of four songs from the British Isles, three of which gained tremendous popularity during World War I: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Danny Boy,” and “Roses of Picardy.” A selection of Russian songs comes next, three of them by Sergei Rachmaninov and another by Anton Arensky, who taught composition to Rachmaninov at the Moscow Conservatory.

Three songs by the French operatic composer Charles Gounod follow the Russian group, including “Oú voulez-vous aller?” one of his best-known melodies. The concert concludes with five songs by popular Italian composers of the period including Paolo Tosti and Ernesto de Curtis.

“Songs from the Salon” will be heard at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Norton Museum of Art. Tickets are $75 and are available from the Chamber Music Society’s website at WeAreChamberMusic.com (or cmspb.org).

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: SPA Trio to perform concert of salon songs at Norton Museum