If you have not yet been to LongHouse Reserve, take this as your sign to get out there before cold weather makes its appearance—which, rather rudely, will come sooner than we think. I cannot believe we are approaching summer’s final act. There is something poignant about experiencing LongHouse now, while gardens remain lush and music drifts ethereally through the trees.
At LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, pianist and composer Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner performed beneath the garden’s tall canopy, where sound traveled through leaves, sculpture and summer air. The sold-out concert, attended by more than 250 guests, was underwritten by philanthropist Barbara Tober in honor of LongHouse founder Jack Lenor Larsen’s birthday. It became an evening about far more than virtuosity. Memory, friendship, American identity and creative legacy all sat down at the piano.
Tober remembered Larsen as a creative force whom she had fought with, worked beside at the Museum of Arts and Design and ultimately came to love. Her remarks carried the honesty of a friendship that survives disagreement and, perhaps, grows richer because of it. Larsen’s longtime partner, Peter Olsen, was present, and Tober gently suggested that Jack was there as well. At LongHouse, where his vision remains embedded in every path and planting, it felt true.
Larsen founded LongHouse in 1991 as a convergence of art, nature and design. Across 16 acres, more than 60 outdoor works by artists including Yoko Ono, Willem de Kooning and Sol LeWitt inhabit the landscape without overpowering it. Sculpture enters into conversation with the garden. Music, on this evening, became another presence within that exchange.
Sánchez-Werner opened with a Rachmaninoff étude before turning toward a program conceived around America’s 250th anniversary. His selections traced American piano literature through composers of varied backgrounds whose voices have shaped the nation’s musical inheritance: George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, Florence Price, Frederic Rzewski and Tanya Yajnik, the evening’s only living composer. Rachmaninoff, who fled Russia and became an American citizen, offered another meaningful strand.
Gershwin, for several reasons reached me differently. My childhood obsession with his music has followed me faithfully into adulthood, still capable of making the world feel more cinematic and the heart slightly less obedient. Rhapsody in Blue remains one of America’s great acts of self-invention: urbane, restless, romantic, cacophonous and entirely unwilling to choose between the concert hall and the street. Hearing it outdoors at LongHouse must have loosened its famous blue notes into the greenery, allowing the composition to become, quite literally, part of the atmosphere.
That choice of repertoire also resisted the temptation to present American music as a single, polished story. Ellington’s Come Sunday carries spiritual yearning; Florence Price’s work speaks from a history classical institutions too often neglected; Ives, Barber and Rzewski reveal distinctly different relationships to modernism, tradition and national character. Together, the program suggested that American culture is not a solo. It is a polyphony—sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant and, at its best, spacious enough to hold contradiction.
Sánchez-Werner embodies that multiplicity himself. Born in California to a Mexican mother and a father of Welsh, German, Polish and Jewish heritage, he approached this musical history not as an abstraction, but as something rather intimately lived. His program asked who belongs within the American canon and answered, elegantly, by widening the bench.
Following the performance, guests lingered for drinks before a smaller group gathered in the Pavilion for a four-course alfresco dinner. Among those present were Louis Bradbury, Nina Gillman, Rita and Charles Bronfman, Faith Popcorn, Ralph Pucci, Mercedes Ruehl and Susan Stroman.
The evening’s final gesture joined music, textile and memory with unusual grace. During dinner, Tober presented LongHouse with her custom kimono, fashioned from Larsen fabric, for its permanent collection. Accepted by Lara Sweeney and Peter Olsen, the gift felt almost ceremonial: something once worn and loved returning to the creative world from which it came.
Perhaps this is how an artistic life continues. It survives not merely through archives or anniversaries, but through the people who cherish, the objects they preserve and the younger artists invited to create within its shelter. Beneath Larsen’s trees, Sánchez-Werner did more than perform American music. He allowed its many histories to breathe together.
For more information, visit LongHouse Reserve.
