Glenn Andres invited me to play in Salisbury’s elegant and austere Congregational Church. Glenn is a retired professor of architectural and urban history, and has published on (among other topics) New England meeting houses and Vermont regional architecture, so he was able to enlighten us on the building’s history. Asahel Parkins, a local builder, who built just three notable buildings, apparently consulted with and likely bought the striking spire design from Burlington architect Ammi B. Young, who went on to design the Vermont State House, the Boston Custom House, and federal buildings across the country as architect for the U.S. Treasury department.

None of Young’s own buildings with this spire design survive, nor are there any extant plans, making the Salisbury church the only surviving example, along with the Stowe church that was copied from it.

Glenn is also at the center of a forward-thinking civic-minded effort to preserve the church as a vital community space in the face of a small and shrinking congregation. He and a few others are launching a non-profit organization to maintain the building if the church is no longer able to do so, and the church is generously diverting a sizable portion of its endowment to the new group.

And Glenn is a point person in a special relationship between the church and the nearby Point CounterPoint music camp. The church has long served as the main performance venue for camp concerts. Beginning with just an upright piano, the church’s generosity was rewarded as Point CounterPoint repeatedly upgraded the piano in the church, permitting the church to use it for their own services and other performances. The current instrument is one of the most beautiful I have played on this tour; more about that in the About the Piano blurb below.

I played a handful of early Mozart pieces to mark the year of Salisbury’s town charter. These are the first pieces of Mozart we have, as notated by his father Leopold when little Wölferl was five years old. They are stunningly precocious, and one might think that the doting and ambitious father had tidied them up, were it not for the fact that the little guy turned grew up to be frikkin’ Mozart. But also, and more touchingly: these first pieces, though still bogglingly impressive for someone who was probably not done wetting his bed, have little quirks and corners that, while charming, sound to me more like the idiosyncracies of someone not fully familiar with the tradition, rather than like knowing deviations from the expected. They are playful, but genuinely childlike, not the witty “childlike” affectation of a grownup. That is, until we get to the Minuet and Trio in G, which I suspect Mozart wrote when he was closer to the ripe age of six. This is in the category of unimprovable gems, and to my ear could be a light-hearted third movement from a serenade written thirty years later, at the end of Mozart’s short career.

The concert benefited the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas, an organization headed by Salisbury resident Jim Andrews, dedicated to monitoring Vermont’s population of these critters through citizen-scientist education and crowdsourcing. Amphibians are indicator species, highly sensitive to disruptions in the environment, so we felt the organization was a good fit to our project’s climate-centered fundraising focus. They took full advantage of the event not just to raise money but to educate the audience with an informative display in the entryway and books and other materials on sale. In honor of the concert beneficiary, I worked up the infectious Frog Legs Rag, the most popular piece by composer James Scott, who is counted as one of the great three “classic ragtime” composers along with Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb.

Sophia Boise, a junior at Middlebury Union High School, joined me for two movements of Handel’s Recorder Sonata in F. I had no idea until I arrived that her teacher was Keith Prescott, a recent UVM graduate who was a composition student of mine. This is hardly an astounding coincidence in a state that has fewer people than the city of Boston, but encountering a “grandstudent” always elicits a thoughtful resonance.