Join us for a wonderful evening of chamber music with Oakham Piano Trio at 7.00pm in All Saints' Church, Oakham. This concert will be followed by Sung Compline with David Hill and Ikon Singers at 8.45pm.

Tickets (£20 in advance, free for under 18s) are available from Oakham Wines, 07809 229292 (Susie), or TicketSource.

This is the opening concert in our Summer Festival Weekend - more details can be found here.

Programme

Gabriel Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor

Felix Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor

Amy Beach: Piano Trio in A minor

Oakham Piano Trio

Annebeth Webb (violin) joined the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2001 and is co-founder of Camerata RCO (an ensemble with members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). Richard Jenkinson was Principal Cellist with CBSO 1998-2016, is a current member of the Dante String Quartet and Musical Director of the British Police Symphony Orchestra. Anne Bolt is Head of Keyboard at Oakham School, studied with Menahem Pressler of the Beaux Arts Trio in Indiana University on a Fulbright Scholarship, and currently divides her time between performing and teaching at Oakham School. 

The programme

Composed relatively late in Gabriel Fauré's life (1923), his Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120 work reveals Fauré's characteristic elegance and harmonic subtlety. The idea for the trio, the penultimate work in Fauré's oeuvre, came in 1922 from his publisher Jacques Durand, who had published Ravel's famous Piano Trio just a few years earlier. Fauré initially did not get beyond sketching the work, and for a while he considered using a clarinet as an alternative to the violin. Only when he went to spend the summer in Annecy-le-Vieux in Savoy did Fauré succeed in writing the Andantino, the unusually extensive, elegiac middle movement of this Trio. The outer movements then followed in Paris the next winter. This late work by Fauré is notable for its clear lines and forms and for its balance between the piano and the string instruments.

Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49 is a cornerstone of the chamber music repertoire, and recognised as one of Mendelssohn's greatest works along with his Octet. This trio, completed in 1839, is brimming with melodic invention, dramatic energy, and a remarkable balance between the three instruments. Its passionate outer movements frame a beautifully songful slow movement and a fleet-footed Scherzo, making it a work of enduring popularity and brilliance.

Composed in 1938, Amy Beach's Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 150 demonstrates Beach's significant contribution to American Romanticism. Beach was the only female member of the prestigious "Second New England School," a group of six composers who were seen as pivotal in establishing an American classical idiom, distinct from European traditions. While the first movement of her piano trio is in a more traditional European style with a rich harmonic language, the second and third movements are folk-like, with Native American influences and even rag-time in the final movement.