Harmony Beyond Music is a series of chamber music concerts exploring themes of equality and diversity, performed by Reiko Fujisawa and friends, and introduced by Peter Quantrill.

Three’s Company

A group of women composers resolving the piano-versus-strings tension at the heart of the piano trio. Clara Schumann broke a path for female musicians in 19th-century Germany as much more than a wife to her composer husband. Rebecca Clarke and Charlotte Sohy composed music of new-found freedom in early 20th-century England and France. Coming up to date, Cecilia McDowall encloses a tribute to music’s perpetual revolutionary Beethoven at the heart of her magical nocturne.

Sohy’s Petite Suite glows with French lyricism and clarity, poised between Fauré and Franck in its elegance. Written in the aftermath of World War I, Clarke’s Piano Trio is striking in its originality, its impressionistic atmosphere recalling Ravel and Debussy while evoking devastation, sorrow and ultimately, new hope. McDowall’s Beethoven-haunted Cavatina at Midnight is spellbindingly evocative while Schumann’s Piano Trio, praised for its calm mastery, is considered by many to be her greatest four-movement work.

Programme

Charlotte Sohy: Petite Suite for Piano Trio, Op. 13 (1921)

Rebecca Clarke: Piano Trio (1921)

Interval

Cecilia McDowall: Cavatina at Midnight (2008)

Clara Schumann: Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846)

Performers

Reiko Fujisawa, piano

Ofer Falk, violin

Ursula Smith, cello

with introductions and insights from Peter Quantrill