Two programs this week feature local musical heroes the Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey Trio — Navah Perlman on piano, Giora Schmidt on violin and Zuill Bailey on cello — and if you have to choose between events, your choice probably will depend on whether you prefer music on a large or intimate scale.
On Saturday and Sunday, the trio will participate in “The Grandest Opening” of the Santa Barbara Symphony‘s 2008-09 season, now in the Granada Theatre. On Thursday, the trio will perform, without the framework of a major social and orchestral event, in Hahn Hall at the Music Academy of the West.
The only chamber ensembles with a literature large enough to support a group with a permanent and fixed personnel — and recording contracts — are the string quartet and the piano-violin-cello trio. In naming themselves, string quartets tend to sacrifice their identities as individual musicians to an abstract corporate personality: Anacapa, Budapest, Guarneri, Emerson, Juilliard, etc.
Conversely, trios are almost always named after their membership (the Beaux Arts Trio being a notable exception). Trios are the “super groups” of classical music, each pianist, violinist and cellist entering the association as an already-established, name-brand musician: Cortot-Thibaud-Casals, Rubinstein-Heifitz-Piatigorsky, Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey — yes, as young as they are — all have thriving solo careers.
The upside of this is that trios often have the tension and spark of strong egos clashing, which makes for exciting, memorable performances. The downside is that trios are not nearly as stable as string quartets, which enjoy the advantage of being able to change personnel without changing their name.
In its Hahn Hall recital, which starts at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, the Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey Trio will play Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Opus 70, No. 2, and Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D Minor, Opus 49. The Beethoven is first-rate; the Mendelssohn is a gem. Tickets are $40 and $35. For additional information, call 805.969.8787.
At 8 p.m. Saturday, the Santa Barbara Symphony, under the baton of Music Director Nir Kabaretti, will sail into a new venue, the Granada Theatre, and possibly into a new era.
To enrich an already gala event, the symphony and Barry Berkus and his wife have commissioned from composer Bruce Broughton (Silverado, Young Sherlock Holmes) a special opening fanfare called Mosaic for Orchestra; they have brought in the mega-watt star power of the Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey Trio to join the symphony in Beethoven’s Concerto in C Major for Piano, Violin, Cello and Orchestra, Opus 56; and they have decided to close with Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, called Titan.
If you are a piano trio and you want to play a concerted work with an orchestra, you are kind of stuck with Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. Fortunately, as with so much of Beethoven, it is an incomparable masterpiece. The first movement has the sweep and heroic optimism of the Second Symphony; the second movement is an exquisite pastoral, as pure and limpid as a poem by Keats; the finale is a cornucopia of elegant tricks. Mahler’s First Symphony, with its eerie, voluptuous forebodings, its gorgeous shadows, its ironic solemnities, is the first great symphony of the 20th century, composed 12 years before it began.
For more information about these events, click here or call 805.898.9386.
Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.