After several years, the Weis Center opened its Atrium once more for performance, and for that moment there could not have been a better choice than the André Mehmari Trio. Some concerts are made for grandeur and scale, but others are meant for closeness, for stillness, for intimacy. This was the latter, a performance that felt less like spectacle and more like a bud slowly opening, quiet, delicate, and full of promise.
André has lived for over twenty five years in the Atlantic Forest, the vast tropical rainforest along Brazil’s coast, and his music carried that landscape within it. The performance was not about evoking nature as an image but embodying it as an experience. As the atrium began to fill, light rain started to fall outside, a rhythm soft and steady against the glass. By the time the lights dimmed, the space felt transformed. What unfolded next was not just music but peace itself, a sanctuary of sound shaped by three musicians who seemed less to play than to breathe their instruments into being.
This was music for reflection and for introspection. It did not seek to unify us in a single feeling but to invite each person into their own quiet journey. Every piece carried its own story, and André, between compositions, offered glimpses into the meaning behind them. Yet it was often in the pauses where the lessons lay, as though his words were seeds of thought and the music that followed was their flowering. The trio’s playing was not there to dictate an emotion but to create a space where we could encounter our own.
What struck me most was the humility woven into the performance. André lifted up the work of other artists, celebrating not only his own creations but the larger world of art he belongs to. There was no pretense, only reverence, a love for music itself that radiated through every gesture. The rain outside kept time, the atrium held its hush, and together they gave us a moment where belonging felt simple and unspoken.
When the final notes faded and applause rose, it did not feel like a celebration of talent alone. It felt like gratitude for impact, for what had been planted within us during that hour. The trio left us not with closure but with continuation, like a bud just beginning to open. Something small, something tender, but something alive, reminding us that from seed to bud, the season was already beginning to grow.
~Shaheryar Asghar, Class of ’28