Making music together is a happily harmonious occupation for Trio con Brio Copenhagen. The award-winning piano trio will perform works by Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Danish composer Per Norgard at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the University of Hawaii at Hilo Performing Arts Center. The concert is part of the Hawaii Concert Society’s 53rd season.
Making music together is a happily harmonious occupation for Trio con Brio Copenhagen. The award-winning piano trio will perform works by Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Danish composer Per Norgard at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at the University of Hawaii at Hilo Performing Arts Center. The concert is part of the Hawaii Concert Society’s 53rd season.
“Our strength comes from our very tight bonds and personal relationships,” said Soo-Kyung Hong, the Denmark-based chamber music ensemble’s cellist.
That is because Soo-Kyung’s sister, Soo-Jin Hong, plays violin and Soo-Kyung’s husband of 14 years, Jens Elvekjaer, is the pianist.
The Hong sisters, born in Seoul, South Korea, are familiar with family music-making.
“My mother is a pianist who wanted everyone in her family to play music. She chose an instrument for each of us,” said Soo-Kyung, whose father a dentist, “really likes to sing.”
Elvekjaer, a Dane, met the sisters while studying in Vienna. They formed Trio con Brio in 1999. Naming the trio was easy, he says.
“We were practicing a lot of pieces whose composers’ instructions were to play them ‘allegro con brio’ (lively with spirit), and someone suggested that we take this as our name,” Elvekjaer said. “It’s a good name because it suits our way of thinking about music and also the way we like to perform. I think chamber music should be lively and full of spirit.“
Since its inception, Trio con Brio has won most of the international competitions for piano trio, including perhaps the most prestigious one of all, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Competition in the U.S. Fifteen years after it was founded, the trio continues to be in international demand and has an intensive worldwide touring schedule. This is its third appearance in Hawaii.
The trio’s sound benefits from the instruments all three play: Soo-Jin plays a violin built by Andrea Guarneri from the 17th century; Soo-Kyung plays a Grancino cello; and Elvekjaer is Denmark’s first Steinway artist.
The Hilo concert will include Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio in C minor,” a four-movement work that embodies all of the finest qualities of the composer’s chamber music. In particular, the second movement is the epitome of Romanticism at its most heartfelt, while the delicate third movement, which whizzes along at breakneck speed like many other of his scherzos, provides technical challenges for all of the performers, but particularly for the pianist.
The Tchaikovsky “Piano Trio in A minor,” a memorial to the composer’s friend, conductor and pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, will form a marked contrast to the Mendelssohn trio, taking the audience through the depths of Tchaikovsky’s sorrow, as well as the joyful times the two spent together.
The concert will begin with “Spell,” a composition by contemporary Danish composer Norgard. Musicologist Esben Tange has likened the music to “cloud formations that imperceptibly change shape and constantly renew themselves, developing in wonderful new directions.“
Trio con Brio has no compunctions about introducing something as unusual as “Spell” to a classical audience.
“It’s very exciting for the audience to open their ears to something new,” said Soo-Kyung. “People are happy to hear something unexpected.”
Tickets are $25 general, $20 seniors, $10 students and $5 for up to three first through 12th grade students accompanied by an adult, available at the Most Irresistible Shop, Music Exchange, East Hawaii Cultural Center and the UH-Hilo box office. Remaining tickets will be sold at the door.
KTA SuperStores is a sponsor of the concert.