Classical music: Sundays at Three
Mendelssohn is set to shine again

By Anthony Sclafani
Posted 9/18/08

The Mendelssohn Piano Trio will open the 12th season of the popular Sundays at Three chamber music series Sept. 21 at historic Christ Episcopal Church in Columbia.

When the Mendelssohn Piano Trio opens the 12th season of the Columbia-based chamber series Sundays at Three Sept. 21, it will be on pretty familiar ground. This Maryland-based ensemble performed as part of the series four years ago, and two of its members participated in an early 2007 concert with pianist Brian Ganz.

Because this is a return visit, the trio has sought to avoid any repetition, notes violinist Peter Sirotin.

"This particular series is very good about wanting variety for the audience," says the Ukraine native and Peabody Conservatory graduate. "They have a lot of loyal audience members who come back all the time."

Sirotin says the series' artistic director, Ronald Mutchnik, also let the group know "if certain pieces had been performed recently. That was definitely a consideration for us."

Finding new and different works for the Columbia program turned out to be no problem for the group. It has been performing a varied repertoire since 1997, winning a big enough following that it now divides its time between residencies in Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Series and at Pennsylvania's Messiah College.

Sirotin was a child prodigy who made his professional debut at age 14 with the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra.

Pianist Ya-Ting Chang was also a professional child performer and became renowned in her native Taiwan after winning first prize in the 1987 Taiwan National Piano Competition. Like Sirotin, she is a Peabody graduate (the Potomac-based duo are also a married couple.)

The trio has increased international appeal with cellist Fiona Thompson, a native of England who studied at the Royal Northern College of Music. Thompson, now a Baltimore County resident, began receiving favorable press notices while she was a cello student at the University of Southern California. She serves as the principal cellist of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra and is a member of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Harrisburg Symphony.

For this Sunday's concert, the musicians will play three pieces: the Haydn Trio in C Major, Schubert's Notturno in E-flat and the Mendelssohn Trio in C Minor. According to Sirotin, the musicians choose material "that has some kind of connection throughout the program. It can be a connection through time, or a connection through content in music."

The works were chosen this time around, he says, because they achieve a balance of different sounds and atmospheres.

"All of them ... were written within 40 or 50 years of each other, but they offer a great variety in both style and content," notes Sirotin. "The Haydn trio was written fairly late in his life, and it's incredibly sophisticated Haydn, full of witty, inventive unexpected surprises and humor."

The Mendelssohn work, he says, is now considered innovative for its time, as well.

"It's one of the very first romantic piano trios," Sirotin observes. "It has some references to Mendelssohn's organ music - in the last movement, there's a part that sounds almost like a church hymn. And the general level of energy in this music is also very intense."

The Schubert composition was meant to be part of a larger suite, which was eventually reconfigured by the composer.

"It was originally written as a slow movement for the B Flat Piano Trio," Sirotin says. "It became too large to fit that movement so it became a piece in itself. And it's very unusual music in instrumentation - in the way Schubert uses instruments texturally. He goes from a very sparse kind of writing which is almost ethereal to a very, very grand royal music that evokes images of oceans and storms. That's quite a difficult thing to achieve in a 13 or 14 minute piece."

Anyone interested in exploring the work of this trio further can go to Amazon or the band's Web site and check out its various CDs on Centaur Records. The group is also heralded as a recording entity, and will be releasing a CD of Mendelssohn piano trios before the year is out.

"There are only two of them that he wrote," Sirotin explains, "so it's pretty exciting."

The Mendelssohn Piano Trio will open the 12th Sundays at Three season Sept. 21 at 3 p.m. at historic Christ Episcopal Church, in Columbia (Oakland Mills Road, opposite Dobbin Road). Admission is $15 general, free for anyone under 18 accompanied by an adult. Call 410-992-0145.