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Top Trios Open Top Series

Lisa Petrie on September 14, 2009
This October, don’t miss a chance to hear what a bright new generation of piano trios is bringing to the stage. Two young yet established groups come to the Bay Area to open two favorite chamber music series with a flourish. The Trio Con Brio Copenhagen kicks off the season for Music at Kohl Mansion on Oct. 4, while the Eroica Trio launches the 54th Morrison Artists Series at San Francisco State University on Oct. 9.
Trio Con Brio

Trio Con Brio Copenhagen — consisting of Korean sisters Soo-Jin Hong, violin, and Soo-Kyung Hong, cello, and Danish pianist Jens Elvekjaer — was founded in Vienna a decade ago. After winning the prestigious ARD-Munich Competition and later the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award in 2005, it quickly established its reputation as “rising stars” among audiences and critics alike by touring internationally.

Bay Area new-music fans might have caught its performance of Norwegian composer Bent Sørensen’s Phantasmagoria at the Other Minds Festival last year, which SFCV reviewed as “hard to describe, though the effect was magical — and the highlight of the festival.” Trio Con Brio will recap this piece on its concert, as well as play traditional jewels by Beethoven and Smetana.

Beethoven’s Trio No. 5 in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1, called the “Ghost,” is one of his most famous works for that configuration of instruments, dating from his “middle period” and composed in Heiligenstadt, Vienna. The Smetana Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15 was the first of several pieces to be inspired by the tragic loss of the composer’s 4-year-old daughter in 1855; like some of his other compositions, it contains stylistic elements of both Schumann and Liszt, and runs the emotional gamut from anguish, to joy, and finally to a feeling of closure.

Eroica Trio

An ensemble that’s perhaps slightly more well-known to American audiences is the Eroica Trio, one of the first all-female ensembles to attain recognition as being in the top-tier; its members are Erika Nickrenz, piano; Susie Park, violin; and Sara Sant’Ambrogio, cello. Formed almost a decade earlier than Con Brio, it captured the prestigious Naumburg Award in 1991, followed by its Carnegie Hall debut in 1997. The trio plays from a extremely wide repertoire, as witnessed by its eight recordings on EMI of everything from Baroque to its newest album available in mid-October, An American Journey, and has earned Grammy nominations for several of them.

Aside from the marketing machine that has capitalized on their good looks, placing them in magazines such as Elle, Glamour, and Vanity Fair, this trio has earned some serious concert hall “cred” for its raw energy and expressive playing. It will give listeners the early Beethoven Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 3, first performed in 1793 in the house of Prince Lichnowsky. The Brahms Trio in B Major, Op. 8 is an early work of that composer, as well, and was almost destroyed by him, thrown into the fire, as were other fledgling pieces that did not meet his stiff requirements. It was, instead, one of his first pieces to be published in 1854. Over 30 years later he revised the work at the suggestion of his publisher Simrock, devising a new version that’s the one mostly played today. The finale movement from Joan Tower’s trio For Daniel (2004) adds a more contemporary twist to the program.

The Morrison Artists Series annually presents six free chamber music concerts on the campus of S.F. State, including one in December by the university’s own quartet in residence, the Alexander String Quartet. The Eroica Trio is “coming home,” having enjoyed its West Coast debut on the series in 1990. They and the Trio Con Brio Copenhagen are taking the torch from the older generation, capitalizing on the energy of youth and the maturity of their years together to help reinvent the future of chamber music.