Opening Night With the Prometheus Trio

After a brief speech by pianist and PianoArts Artistic Chair Stefanie Jacob, her trio kicked off a week of PianoArts events with a performance of Arno Babadjanian's Piano Concerto in F#.

To this blogger, the first movement was all about conflict and calm, crisis and retreat. Babadjanian's work, which Jacob described as "cyclic" and based around a returning motto, starts out sleepy and escalates into apocalyptic within the first ninety seconds. The trio draws down into a gentler piano solo, climbs back into another crisis and eventually pulls back. The term "roller-coaster ride" is pretty overused as a descriptor, but it's an apt one for the first movement of Babadjanian's masterpiece.

Violinist Tim Klabunde and cellist Scott Tisdel did a good job of drawing out the wildness in the concerto, then pulling back when it was time to calm down. Klabunde's high, keening violin could be heard frequently over Jacob's thunderous chords later in the first movement. The whole thing stopped in mid-phrase, a tremulous violin solo crawls out of the wreckage and the cycle starts again. Babadjanian must've loved that effect, because it happens at least three times in the piece. After a relatively quiet, breathy second movement, the trio carried off a sharp third movement filled with angry pizzicato.  Instead of periodically calming down, the piece started wild and got wilder. Jacob, Klabunde and Tisdel kept it together all the way to the much-applauded finish.

As Milwaukee's classical aficionados will know, the Prometheus Trio has a good deal of experience not only with each other, but with this concerto specifically; they last played it in April during their normal trio series at the Conservatory. You'll pardon this blogger's syrupiness, since both of his parents are in the trio (Tisdel and Jacob), but it really did seem to show. Piano, violin and cello played off each other very well; throughout the piece, they kept a good sense of when to pour on the intensity and when to ease up. On the penultimate flourish, seconds before the piece ended, they even jerked back and nodded their heads in unison before playing the final notes. All in all, it was a spirited beginning to this week of PianoArts events (and hopefully lit a fire under the semifinalists!)