All photos by William Trevaskis
A piano was on fire. Its skeletal silhouette, stark against vibrant orange flames, drew a crowd around it, as they sought warmth and light on a frigid December evening, the longest night of the year.
The flaming piano was one of eight concurrent performances at the 2025 winter solstice event put on by Vigorous Tenderness and hosted on December 21, 2025, at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. Titled “Piano Burning,” and composed by Annea Lockwood in 1968, the piece has become a mainstay of Vigorous Tenderness’s winter concerts, the only piece to receive repeat performances from year to year.
“To me, it’s not a piece about destroying a piano or destruction and violence, it’s a piece about light and warmth and bringing people together and asking questions about what is music, what is composition?” said Kal Sugatski, Vigorous Tenderness’s founder and artistic director.
Vigorous Tenderness, which produces site-specific, largely outdoor chamber music concerts for the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and the winter and summer solstices, was founded in 2020 by Sugatski to solve the problem of how people could safely gather to hear live performances during the pandemic. Each event consists of several chamber music performances that occur simultaneously in different locations at the event site. Audience members walk from performance to performance and can spend as much time as they like at each.
In Vigorous Tenderness, Sugatski, an avid ocean swimmer and winter hiker, blends passion for the outdoors with a contemporary imagining of chamber music experiences. A Portland native whose musical credentials include the New York Philharmonic, NYC Ballet, principal violist of the Orchestra of St. Luke, and performances with Stevie Wonder, Sugatski was named 2022 “Mainer of the Year” by The Maine Mag for creating Vigorous Tenderness.
“[Chamber] music was designed to be shared really intimately and played for small groups of people in small spaces,” Sugatski said, explaining the group’s approach to performances. “I love how at these concerts audience members can get really close to the ensemble and move around and can experience the music more immersively than a typical concert hall experience.” For the 175 attendees at the first Vigorous Tenderness event in 2020, Sugatski, who often performs in the events, said it never felt as though a crowd had gathered during that pandemic-era show, making the event feel safe for performers and visitors. Now that larger gatherings are possible, hundreds of people might walk through each concert, with attendance at the Maine Maritime Museum reaching 850.
Fire and light are important elements of Vigorous Tenderness concerts, with thousands of feet of little white lights and hundreds of candles in use. But many performances specifically honor the water as well, including a quartet performed by musicians in drifting kayaks, and a 2018 piece at the 2025 winter solstice performance in Bath by Adeliia Faizullina titled “Water. Under. Live I,” which evoked both Tatar folk songs and sea shanties. It was performed in Maine Maritime Museum’s boatshop, in which local builders still work.
“Putting it in a boatshop felt like a fun and playful thing to do because there’s so much water imagery in the piece. It was a delightful experience to welcome people into the space where Mainers are currently working in a boatbuilding shop. This is our history, part of being a coastal Mainer,” Sugatski said.
The group’s associate director, Katherine Liccardo, a violinist, recalled a fall equinox event at Bug Light Park in South Portland, which featured boat horns as instruments. “I think it was six to eight boats and it’s all timed, they had to blow their horn at a certain time,” she said. The piece, “Chorale for Four to Eight Docked Ships with Fog Horns,” was composed by Raven Chacon, a member of the Navajo Nation. Spotlighting composers from marginalized communities is essential to Vigorous Tenderness’s mission, Sugatski said, and pieces are often selected to intentionally dovetail with the location of the event.
One piece at the winter solstice concert in Bath, “Epitomes 3, 4, and 5 from Pisachi,” by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, connected deeply to Maine Maritime’s Re|Sounding exhibition. “There’s this initiative at Maine Maritime Museum to broaden the scope of stories that we are interpreting at the museum; right now we have this exhibit Re|Sounding which is uplifting the undertold stories of Maine’s Indigenous and Black mariners,” said Amanda Pleau, the museum’s marketing and communications manager. “There’s a lot of contemporary art in the exhibit but it sort of also aligns with Vigorous Tenderness’s mission of uplifting marginalized voices in classical music,” she added.
Pleau reached out to Sugatski after attending a summer solstice performance to suggest the museum as an event site. After a walk-through, they were easily convinced of its appropriateness.
“They came to us with really open arms and collaborative energy and we toured the space and it was an immediate yes,” Sugataski said. “We’ve also never been that far up the coast, so working with them has been a great way to reach people who’d never been before.”
As Sugatski and their team plan for the spring equinox event, which will be held on March 20 (the location will be announced a month in advance, see below), accessibility remains at the forefront of their mission. “For my whole life I’ve been constantly in music situations where I’m thinking about, ‘How can we make this more accessible, get more people to connect with a really vibrant art form that I totally believe in?’ This concert series is my best offering of how to do that, where grownups can come, really little kids can come, we’re not checking status, undocumented people can come, we’re not charging admission,” Sugatski said. The innovative programming, a sliding-scale suggested donation, and outdoor venues all result in an audience that skews younger and more diverse than a typical classical music performance.
“There are a lot of young people at these concerts and a lot of diversity and I think we do strive for something extremely accessible,” said associate director Liccardo. “It’s great for kids because it gives you breathing room and time to process each performance because you’re walking from one to the next, and you’re outside which, you know, nature is very calming.”
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Courtney Naliboff is a writer, educator, and musician on North Haven island. Her first book, Your Postpartum Body: The Complete Guide to Healing After Pregnancy, was released in June 2024.
To See a Performance
Vigorous Tenderness announces its next performance venue one month before the event. The vernal equinox event will be held on March 20. More information can be found on Instagram @vigorous.tenderness, or at the website vigoroustenderness.org.
