William Warfield’s dedication of a song about losing a loved one, in which he asked the crowd to not applaud but to take the feeling home with them from Friday’s tribute to Edwin P. Romain Jr. at Shryock, caused audience members to weep during the emotion-filled finale.

Earlier, when Warfield joined Wilfred Delphin’s piano playing to sing Roland Hayes’ Excerpts From the Life of Christ, the already stellar evening was elevated beyond that point.

Warfield sang Lil’l Boy-How Old Are You? while looking out at an imaginary child in the crowd. Pleading with his hands and shuffling his feet when he sang the question, he started a one-man stage show eclipsed only by Delphin’s delicate sound that was the canvas to Warfield’s painting.

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The SIU String Quartet, coupled with Delphin’s backbone piano, was the best combination of sound created.

When Delphin took the stage, he joked briefly with the crowd, letting them know how important this tribute to his former duet partner Romain was to him.

While Delphin sat and calmly played the setting of Molto Moderato Quasi Lento, the quartet fingered its instruments and shifted in their chairs with the intensity of the surreal string sounds. Each meaningful stroke of the bows over their instruments formed an emotional feeling for the audience’s ears.

Organist Marianne Webb started the evening looking visually overwhelmed by the gigantic organ in Shryock’s balcony. The audience was mesmerized with eyes glaring upward and to their right, as if they were listening to an angel’s message.

If the pearl lighting in Shryock was dimmed and of a different hue, it would have been a haunting performance. Instead, it was the cosmic carnival-sounding notes that Webb produced with her fingertips that kept the crowd’s ears longing for more of Mozart’s Fantasie in F Minor.

When soprano Jeanine Wagner took the stage with pianist Margaret Simmons, the two created a fine wine of sound with Mozart’s Martern Aller Arten. With her shoulders pulled all the way back and hands out in front grasping the air to give her larynx the fuel it needed, Wagner sang with more grace than an olympic diver’s launch from the elevated platform.

Overall, the crowd of approximately 400 witnessed an exercise in musical mastery. The ultimate musical experience is when the sounds and emotion of the artists penetrate the sould as well as the eardrum. Friday’s performances were astonishing in the least and the ultimate in musical experiences at best.

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