We are pleased to welcome the Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch for their North American premiere. Please join us to hear their great precision and glorious sound!
Audiences have greeted Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch with great enthusiasm, starting immediately after the musicians formed the trio in 2009. Shaham and Raphael Wallfisch played chamber music together at the 2009 Pablo Casals Prades Festival, where they recognised an immediate musical synergy. Arnon Erez joined them for concerts later that year and the trio was established.
Hagai Shaham has performed as a soloist with many major orchestras, including the BBC Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He and Erez have enjoyed international success as a violin-piano duo, as well as winning first prize at the 1990 ARD International Music Competition in Munich.
Arnon Erez is one of Israel’s leading pianists and an outstanding chamber musician. He has won several international competitions and has performed in major festivals and concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Musikverein, Vienna, new Auditorium du Louvre, and London’s Wigmore Hall.
Raphael Wallfisch was born in London into a family of distinguished musicians, his mother the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and his father the pianist Peter Wallfisch. At 24, he had already won the Gaspar Cassado International Cello Competition in Florence. Since then he has enjoyed an international career as a soloist and is one of the most recorded classical artists in the world.
“… utterly moving… The musicians know, with minute precision, how to guard the boundary between the intimacy of chamber music and the sweeping grandeur of a large-scale concert, only achievable by artists whose capacities and experience are on an equally high level.” –Fonoforum
The Trio’s programme of elegantly Romantic music offers the lightness of Arensky and Beethoven that contrasts beautifully with the drama of Brahms and Rachmaninoff.
Programme:
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano trio in D major, Opus 70 No.1
Anton Arensky
Piano trio No.1 in D minor, Opus 32
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Trio élégiaque No.1 in G minor (1892)
Johannes Brahms
Piano trio in C Major, Opus 87
Beethoven’s piano trio Opus 70 No. 1 is also known as the “Ghost”. It received its nickname due to the eerie, unsettling sounding slow movement sandwiched between two bright, forthright faster movements.
The melodic Romantic music of Arensky’s piano trio No. 1, Opus 32, influenced by Tchaikovsky, features a typical Arensky Waltz in the second movement.
When Rachmaninoff was a 19 year old student, he wrote his Trio élégiaque No. 1, a short, sweet piece of music, as a homage to Tchaikovsky.
Brahms trio Opus 87 is a Romantic work written in the 1880s when the composer was at the peak of his powers. The music is built in part on sonata form, while also including a gypsy-like Hungarian theme in the Andante. The final exuberant movement brings this masterwork of the repertoire to a close.
If you’re at the concert, be sure to tweet us @FCMVancouver and use hashtag #FCMTrioSEW!
