Trio Reimagined 01/11/24

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Trio Reimagined

Featured Artists

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  Benjamin Beilman, violin

  American violinist Benjamin Beilman is winning plaudits across the globe for his compelling and impassioned performances, his deep rich tone and searing lyricism. The Scotsman has described him as “a remarkable talent, delivering playing of rare insight and generosity, as captivating as it is gloriously entertaining” and the New York Times has praised his “handsome technique, burnished sound, and quiet confidence [which] showed why he has come so far so fast”.

  Recent highlights include solo performances with Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Janowski, the Wroclaw Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra.

  In recital and chamber music, Beilman performs regularly at the major halls across the world, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, Louvre (Paris), Philharmonie (Berlin), and Concertgebouw (Amsterdam). 

  Beilman studied with Almita and Roland Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago, Ida Kavafian and Pamela Frank at the Curtis Institute of Music, and Christian Tetzlaff at the Kronberg Academy, and has received many prestigious accolades including a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a London Music Masters Award. Beilman plays the “Engleman” Stradivarius from 1709 generously on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.

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  Arnaud Sussmann, violin/viola

  Winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Arnaud Sussmann has distinguished himself with his unique sound, bravura, and profound musicianship. Minnesota’s Pioneer Press writes, “Sussmann has an old-school sound reminiscent of vintage recordings by Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler, a rare combination of sweet and smooth that can hypnotize a listener.” 

  Mr. Sussmann has recently appeared as a soloist with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, and the Vancouver, and New World Symphonies. As a chamber musician, he has performed at the Tel Aviv Museum, London’s Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, and the White Nights Festival in Saint Petersburg. He has also given concerts at the Caramoor, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, and Seattle Chamber Music festivals, collaborating with many of today’s leading artists including Itzhak Perlman, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Wu Han, David Finckel, and Jan Vogler. 

  Sussmann is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, Co-Director of Music@Menlo’s International Program, and teaches at Stony Brook University. 

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  Edward Arron, cello

  Cellist Edward Arron has garnered recognition worldwide for his elegant musicianship,impassioned performances, and creative programming. He has appeared in recital, as a soloist with major orchestras, and as a chamber musician throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

  The 2023-24 season marks Mr. Arron’s 11th season as the co-artistic director with his wife, Jeewon Park, of the Performing Artists in Residence series at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mr. Arron tours and records as a member of the renowned Ehnes String Quartet and he is a regular performer at the Boston and Seattle Chamber Music Societies, the Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, Bargemusic, Caramoor, Bowdoin International Music Festival, Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, Seoul Spring Festival in Korea, Music in the Vineyards Festival, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Manchester Music Festival, and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. He has appeared as a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and has performed numerous times in Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully and David Geffen Halls, New York’s Town Hall and the 92^nd Street Y. Other festival appearances include Salzburg, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, PyeongChang, Bravo! Vail, Bridgehampton, Spoleto USA, Santa Fe, Evian, La Jolla Summerfest, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Chamber Music, and the Bard Music Festival. He has participated in Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project as well as Isaac Stern’s Jerusalem Chamber Music Encounters. Mr. Arron’s performances are frequently broadcast on American Public Media’s Performance Today. In 2021, Mr. Arron’s recording of Beethoven’s Complete Works for Cello and Piano with pianist Jeewon Park was released on the Aeolian Classics Record Label. The recording received the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artists Award from the Classical Recording Foundation.

  In the May of 2022, Mr. Arron stepped down after 15 years as the artistic director of the acclaimed Musical Masterworksconcert series in Old Lyme, Connecticut. In 2013, he completed a ten-year residency as the artistic director of the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert, a chamber music series created in 2003 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Museum’s prestigious Concerts and Lectures series. Mr. Arron was also the artistic director of the USCB Chamber Music Series in Beaufort, South Carolina from 2009-2021, and the Chamber Music on Main concert series at the Columbia (SC) Museum of Art from 2009-2018.

  Edward Arron began playing the cello at age seven in Cincinnati and continued his studies in New York with Peter Wiley. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he was a student of Harvey Shapiro. In 2016, Mr. Arron joined the faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst, after having served on the faculty of New York University from 2009 to 2016.

About The Music

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  Borodin: String Trio in G major (Unfinished)

  Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), born out of an affair between a Russian prince and an indentured serf, was raised in his father’s privileged household even though he was denied the family name. His boyhood interest in music gave way to a teenage obsession with chemistry, a pursuit he leveraged into research positions around Europe and ultimately an influential career in science.

  While studying at St. Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy from 17 to 23, Borodin unwound by playing chamber music with a circle of friends. Sometime during that period in the early 1850s, he wrote two movements of this Trio in G Major for two violins and cello, but he never went back to add the expected finale. Borodin turned out to be a natural with chamber music, with a knack for stretching out long, attractive phrases and weaving clear textures of layered voices. The Allegro and Andante movements that comprise this trio turned out to be precursors to the two string quartets that Borodin wrote in his prime—the best examples of that genre from within the band of composers dubbed “The Russian Five.”

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  Leclair: Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 3, No. 5

  Drawing on his background as a dancer and composer of ballet music, Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764) fashioned himself into the first French violinist-composer to rival the dominant Italians of the era. He crystallized his supple approach to technique and form in four books of violin sonatas published between 1723 and 1743, with aspects of Corelli’s seminal Italian sonatas melded into the French dance suite as perfected by Lully.

  Leclair’ Opus 3 was a set of six sonatas scored skillfully for two violins as equal partners, including this Sonata in E Minor (Op. 3, No. 5). True to the French fashion, the latter movements adapt the rhythmic patterns of popular court dances: the heavy-stepping gavotte in the middle movement, and the barreling gigue (equivalent to a British jig) for the finale.

   

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  Jessie Montgomery: Duo for Violin and Cello

  Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981) began classical violin lessons at age four, but she learned just as much from the days she spent at her father’s rehearsal studio for rock and jazz bands in Manhattan’s East Village. Since studying violin performance at The Juilliard School and film scoring at New York University, she established herself as an essential composer, performer and educator within New York’s dynamic music scene. Commissions from the New York Philharmonic and National Symphony Orchestra (among many, many others) confirm that Montgomery has earned a lasting place in the highest echelon of living composers.

  The Duo for Violin and Cello from 2015 “was written for my friend and cellist Adrienne Taylor,” says Montgomery. “The piece is meant as an ode to friendship with movements characterizing laughter, compassion, adventure, and sometimes silliness.”

   

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  Dohnányi: Serenade in C Major

  Ernö Dohnányi (1877-1960), along with his slightly younger compatriots Bartók and Kodály, revolutionized Hungarian music in the twentieth century. Of those three composers, Dohnányi was the most committed to the Classical traditions in the German-Austrian lineage of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. In that same spirit, he tended to use the German version of his name, Ernst von Dohnányi.

  Composed in 1902, the Serenade in C Major exemplifies Dohnányi’s marriage of Classical sensibility with late-Romantic harmonies and textures. For composers of Mozart’s era, the Serenade was a type of music written as entertainment for evening gatherings, often performed outdoors. Sometimes the musicians would take their places while playing an introductory march, and Dohnányi echoed this tradition in his festive first movement. His instrumentation also has Classical roots, mirroring Mozart’s many divertimentos (another form of party music) for the same trio of violin, viola and cello. While the structure is grounded in the past, the musical language of the Serenade is fresh and lyrical, especially in the passionate Romanza.

   

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