The exciting Ojai chamber music series, Chamber on the Mountain, offers its next concert Sunday, and features the accomplished young ensemble, the Trio Cavatina.
The trio — Harumi Rhodes, violin; Priscilla Lee, cello; and Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano — were winners of the 2009 Naumburg International Chamber Music Competition in New York City.
Three works grace the Trio Cavatina’s program: Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 2 in c-minor, Opus 66; Franz Schubert’s Notturno in Eb-Major, Opus 148 (D. 897); and Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 1 in d-minor, Opus 63.
The Trio Cavatina has shown themselves perfectly at ease in the modern — not to say avant garde — idiom, and have even premiered works. Yet all three of the works on the program were written in the first half of the 19th century, and were not, even then, generally perceived to be pushing the envelope.
Of course, there are some peculiar passages in the Schumann trio, as there are peculiar passages in everything he wrote, but they are more of the sort to make the listener scratch his or her head, rather than the kind to send music off in a whole new direction. Schumann was the foremost champion of new music in his day, but his support was given as freely to the ultra-conservative Johannes Brahms as to the radical firebrands, Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.
Nevertheless, the Schumann, written just two years after the Mendelssohn, is the most “modern” sounding of these three works — probably because he had been intensely studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, who always seems to provoke composers to explore new territory.
The Schubert is an exquisite bibelot, and the Mendelssohn is, like everything he ever wrote, perfectly wonderful and wonderfully perfect.
Under the direction of Heidi Lehwalder, the Chamber on the Mountain series concert is at 3 p.m. Sunday in Logan House, adjacent to the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts at 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road in Ojai.
General admission to Trio Cavatina is $25; student admission is $15. Tickets are available by phone at 805.646.9951 or click here to purchase tickets online.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.