Time for Three packs each moment with great music at World Café Live

Time for Three has always been viscerally dazzling. The Curtis Institute-born string trio has always packed enough music into any given moment that you'd swear the group is Time for Six. In a Wednesday homecoming concert at World Cafe Live, 14 years after forming in Rittenhouse Square when the players were only students, Time for Three grew ever more interesting.

The combination of charm and extreme technical prowess among violinists Zachary De Pue and Nicolas Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer seemed more than enough to power a career's worth of albums and concerts. But in an evening of music drawn from its new album, titled Time for Three (on the Universal Music Classics label), its fusion of pop, classical, and world-music elements is increasingly ingenious, transcending mere cleverness or novelty, with a concision one does not hear among like-minded ensembles.

There's no lingering over a vamp, or reprising a melody just because it's nice to hear again. No theme returns without a new musical or emotional turn, and one that's part of a larger arc fashioned with the narrative sureness of a seasoned opera composer.

Most daring, particularly in a supper club setting such as World Cafe Live, is how quiet and expansive the trio dared to be. The set started that way, despite rain and thunder outdoors and noise bleeding over from other parts of the club indoors. Little matter that the waitstaff crisscrosses the room while the music is playing. The group's concentration was contagious, but the contrapuntal underpinning of songs such as "Roundabouts" (written by Kendall) also gave listeners plenty to concentrate on.

These quiet beginnings were also part of a smart, overall sequencing that climaxed during the two-hour set. The heady succession of music had the group's older showpieces ("Csárdás") saved for later, wowing the hometown crowd. Amid the between-song banter, Time for Three discovered in this nonclassical setting that a number of Stravinsky fans were in the majority, in a mash-up that included music from The Firebird.

One reason such mash-ups are appealing to a crowd more used to the Stravinsky-orchestrated original is that nothing really gets mashed, and everything is played with a sense that the group members wouldn't take on this music if they didn't love it deeply. For the pop crowd, "Orange Blossom Special" was woven in with "Sunshine of Your Love." Who would ever have thought of that?

Artistically, the group's apex came with Chaconne in Winter, an arrangement of Bach's Chaconne done by Steven Hackman from one of the trio's jam sessions. All elements, from Bach's to the group's own, are fascinatingly blended with such fluidity that, at least in the moment of performance, you couldn't tell where one left off and the other began, and (more important) you wouldn't want to try. Meyer, in particular, draws a range of expression one seldom hears from his deep-voiced instrument.

Those not used to World Cafe Live might be surprised to know that holding a ticket doesn't guarantee a seat or viable place to stand. Listeners were allowed to sit on the stage with the performers. Imagine playing a concert with a working critic lounging around at your feet! Lucky the Curtis Institute had reserved a large table, in what was a true hometown audience.

When that audience was asked who had heard the group's improvised appearance years back, when the Philadelphia Orchestra had to cancel its Beethoven Symphony No. 9 performance during a power failure, at least a dozen hands shot up. The chants of "thank you" from the group were many and profuse - everybody but the trio's ex-girlfriends - since Time for Three's existence is very much a product of audience support, and not just some music-industry imperative.