The Gould Piano Trio looks forward to performing works by Shostakovich, Fanny Mendelssohn, Helen Grime and Smetana at this year’s Corbridge Chamber Music Festival.
As co-artistic directors of the Corbridge Chamber Music Festival, the Gould Piano Trio has presented audiences with masterpieces for the genre as well as innovative new repertoire for over twenty years. This year’s festival features the trio’s highly anticipated performance of Shostakovich’s 1967 song cycle ‘Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok’ with soprano Claire Booth. In the trio’s words
We thought it would be a fascinating musical experience to return to the bleak, inward but starkly beautiful ‘Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok’ for Soprano and piano trio by Dmitry Shostakovich, for our 2024 festival.
These gems are always a challenge but we are looking forward to forging an interpretation with the wonderful Claire Booth, in order to convey the emotional suffering of the text and music to our audience.
Many of the greatest 20th Century composers gave up on the piano trio, but luckily for us, Shostakovich wasn’t one of them. This is his late work for the idiom when his health was beginning to fail so in essence, together with his early student work, then the central op.67 masterpiece in E minor, the Blok songs round out the picture.
Over the course of the three day festival, the Trio will also perform Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15, Helen Grime’s Three Whistler Miniatures, and Fanny Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor, op. 11. Additionally, they will be heard in mixed chamber music alongside their co-artistic director, clarinettist Robert Plane, and a roster of outstanding guest artists. Full information on the festival is available here.
The Gould Piano Trio has been compared in the Washington Post to the great Beaux Arts Trio for their “musical fire” and “dedication to the genre” and has remained at the forefront of the international chamber music scene for over a quarter of a century. The Goulds are currently immersed in their next major recording project, the seven Heinrich Marschner Piano Trios and two Piano Quartets, and look forward to returning to the studio in April 2024 for the second album in this series for Naxos.
The Trio can be heard performing across the UK this spring, with tickets and more information for each performance available at the links below.
2 March 2024 | 7:00 pm | Corbridge Chamber Music Festival
6 April 2024 | 7:30 pm | Espressivo Concert Promotions
16 April 2024 | 7.45pm | Richmond Concert Society
20 May 2024 | 7.30pm | Music in the Round
16 June 2024 | 11.30am | Wigmore Hall
