SONIC TRUTH.(Brief Article)

Another good thing about New York is that an ancient-music musician looking for an ancient room in which to play his or her original ancient instrument might not have to leave town. An ancient-music musician can find a fairly ancient room--and, in this case, "ancient" is defined as "a lot older than the United States of America"--in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan.

This news was a relief to Christine Matovich, the producer of Parthenia, the much-praised consort of viols, which was searching recently for an acoustically appropriate place to record a CD of seventeenth-century viol music. Matovich and her recording engineer, Mark Christensen, had looked everywhere: at St. Agnes Church, across from Grand Central Terminal, which seemed like a good candidate, until they were told that the priests there go to bed early and might not abide late-night viol-playing; and then at Grace Church, in the East Village, which is also very old-sounding, except for the sound of what runs beneath it--the not-so-old subway. But when they arrived at a reception for Parthenia at the East Forty-ninth Street home of the artist David Deutsch, they were immediately blown away: (1) by the room--it is twenty feet wide and fifty feet long, with two fireplaces, thick walls, and a stunning, high seventeenth-century wooden ceiling, which was imported, Latin inscriptions, stained glass, and all, from Italy--and (2) by the room's acoustics.

"I love the sound of this room," Matovich said, as Parthenia began setting up the other day.

"The room is fantastic," Lawrence Lipnik said. Lipnik plays the tenor viol. The other members of Parthenia are Beverly Au, on bass viol; Rosamund Morley, on treble viol; and Lisa Terry, also on bass viol. The viol, by the way, is a six-stringed contraption that looks a little like a cross between a violin and a guitar.

Deutsch was away in the country while Parthenia occupied his town house, but he gave a tour of it over the phone. It was originally owned by Charlotte Hunnewell Martin, who, around 1920, bought all the houses on the block, renovated them, designed a communal garden, and sold the buildings to a group of neighbors that eventually included Maxwell Perkins, Learned Hand, Katharine Hepburn, Stephen ...