Originally founded as resident chamber ensemble of the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria, the Gold Coast Trio, with violinist Rachel Vetter Huang, cellist Susan Lamb Cook and pianist Hao Huang, has been hailed for its richly expressive and emotionally powerful performances. Featured at the 2005 Lake Tahoe Music Festival in the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the Reno Philharmonic, the Gold Coast Trio has thrilled audiences both in the USA and abroad. Their 2006 performance at the Liszt Concert Hall in Raiding, Austria was featured on Austrian National Television and they presented concerts and master classes in the city of Xiamen, China in the spring of 2008. The Gold Coast Trio has appeared at the Haydnfestspiele, Eisenstadt and the Bessie Bartlett Frankel Festival of Chamber Music at Scripps College.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
Piano Trio in D Major, op. 70, no. 1 (“Ghost Trio”)
Beethoven’s first published opus was a set of three trios for piano, violin, and cello, which appeared in Vienna in 1795. After a hiatus of more than a decade, the mature, established composer returned to the medium. In his opus 1 trios, Beethoven had experimented with featuring the two string instruments more prominently than in the keyboard-dominated trios of Mozart and Haydn. With the opus 70 trios, full emancipation has been gained; witness the free conversational interplay between equals that is one of the glories of the Viennese classical style.
The D major trio’s outer movements display Beethoven’s characteristic energy and wit. But the middle movement, from which the nickname “Ghost” derives, is an excursion into the strange and unexpected, which is extreme even for Beethoven: rumbling tremolos, eerie chromatics and stark unisons create a slow-motion drama of astounding profundity.
Amy Cheney Beach (1867 - 1944)
Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in A Minor, op. 150
Anecdotes of Amy Cheney’s early musical accomplishments recall tales of the infant Mozart: at age one, she not only knew forty songs, but sang them in their specific keys; by two, she improvised countermelodies when her mother sang. Her early fame was as a pianist, but after her marriage, at age eighteen, to H.H.A. Beach, she severely limited her performing engagements. For 25 years, until her husband’s death, her main musical outlet was composition.
Although Beach was a master of large-scale form, the Trio, opus 150 is a model of economy. The first and third movements encapsulate a full range of color and character; each sweeps from shimmeringly delicate to monumental within a relatively short time. Perhaps, at age 71, Beach felt entitled to condense the Romantic palette to its essentials. The middle movement wittily telescopes the normal two inner movements of a Romantic work: a sparkling Scherzo, based on an Inuit melody, appears as the contrasting middle section of the slow movement, while the outer sections of that movement convey an aching emotional intensity.
Leonard Bernstein (1918 - ¬1990)
Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano
Renowned conductor Leonard Bernstein’s compositional output encompassed several hit Broadway musicals as well as a concert repertoire including three symphonies, ballet scores, and devotional works of great originality. In 1937 Bernstein composed an ambitious work which he published nearly half a century later, at his own expense. The Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano was first in a series of early instrumental compositions that were not only significant in themselves, but from which he drew for material in later works. Bernstein first performed this Trio with some of his fellow undergraduates at Harvard University.
It is a kaleidoscope of the young composer’s enthusiasms, as well as of the variety of his skills: the austere, formal beauty of the first movement gives way to the second movement’s comical, pizzicato Scherzo. By the third movement, cello pizzicato has acquired a distinct flavor of Jazz. But ultimately, the musical style which emerges triumphant by the trio’s end is Klezmer, the exuberant instrumental music of Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities.
Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
Oblivion
Piazzolla was child prodigy on the bandoneon, Tango’s traditional accordion-like instrument. His interests nonetheless included non-traditional elements which, at first, he expressed as a composer of European-style art music. Parisian pedagogue Nadia Boulanger persuaded Piazzolla that rather than abandon Tango, he might meld elements of chromaticism, dissonance and structural freedom with the traditional idiom. The result , now called “Nuevo Tango”, is an enthralling music which has become indispensable on the concert stage. “Oblivion” exhibits the subtle, complex harmonies, the soaring melody and the rhythmic scintillation which are Piazzolla’s gift to the Classical music world.
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