Time: Lili Boulanger
Backstage with the Linos Piano Trio
Sunday, April 25, 2021
Although this event has ended, you can watch the entire program below.
View the 2021 Birdfoot Festival season program book here
Program
Lili Boulanger: Deux Pièces en trio (1918)
D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning)
D’un soir triste (Of a sad evening)
Join Birdfoot and the Linos Piano Trio to discover the music and musical universe of composer Lili Boulanger. Boulanger was only twenty-four years old when she wrote D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste, two trios evoking the contrasting energies of two times of day, morning and evening.
Simultaneously, she was experiencing her own dawn and dusk: as the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, she was emerging as a formidable musical voice; she was also suffering from a chronic intestinal illness which took her life later in the same year. Tragic as her early death was, her music remains powerfully alive. These two trios are fresh with new energy, while possessing a sense of perspective usually associated with “late” works. Her music stands alongside masterpieces by Debussy and Fauré in ambition, evocativeness, and originality.
Both D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste are built around the same few notes, but like a painter capturing the same scene in different lights, Boulanger uses colorful harmonies to capture two gripping, but entirely different emotional moments.
About the Linos Piano Trio:
First Prize and Audience Prize winner of the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition 2015, the Linos Piano Trio is increasingly recognised as one of Europe’s most creative and dynamic trios.
Drawing on the rich and varied cultural and musical backgrounds of its members, which encompass five nationalities, as well as specialisms in historically-informed performance and new music, the Linos Piano Trio possesses a colourful and distinctive musical voice. Praised for its “slow-burning, gripping performance” by The Strad, and an “astounding performance” by the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, the trio’s reputation has taken it to prestigious venues worldwide including the Barbican and Wigmore Halls, Melbourne Recital Centre, Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, Holzhausenschlösschen in Frankfurt, Théâtre Saint-Louis in France, and the György Ligeti Saal in Graz.
Founded in October 2007, the Linos Piano Trio studied at the Guildhall and then at the Musikhochschule Hannover with Oliver Wille and Markus Becker. The ensemble has also received the guidance of Sir András Schiff, Peter Cropper, Ferenc Rados, Rainer Schmidt and Eberhard Feltz. The trio first came to prominence in the Tunnell Trust Showcase for Young Musicians, and in 2014 was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Albert and Eugenie Frost Prize for an outstanding ensemble.
In 2016 the trio embarked on its current ongoing project ‘Stolen Music’, a rapturously-received series of creative arrangements of orchestral masterpieces such as Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, and Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Since 2017 they have held the position of ‘Artists-in-Residence’ at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London.
The Linos Piano Trio recorded the complete Piano Trios by C.P.E. Bach to celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth, and the CDs were issued by CAvi-music in May 2020. The release received several five-star reviews across the European press, with Gramophone magazine describing the playing as “smart, efficient and alert to Bach’s quicksilver changes of mood and material”. The trio was immediately invited to make a further recording, this time in a partnership between Bayerischer Rundfunk and CAvi-music. For this second CD, the Linos Piano Trio have recorded a selection of four large-scale works from their ‘Stolen Music’ project, inspired by a famous quote of Igor Stravinsky: “good composers borrow, great ones steal”. The disc will be released later in 2021. Learn more about the Linos Piano Trio here.
Photo credit: Kaupo Kikkas