Take a look at recent updates to our CONCERT CALENDAR. First up: a series of four concerts in Raleigh and Charlotte, NC in September presented by Chamber Music Raleigh! Works by Haydn, Schubert, Lili Boulanger and Brian Raphael Nabors.
Read MoreWe are thrilled to share our collaboration with phenomenal filmmaker Sara Pettinella! Filmed in New York City and Georgia during the lockdown, the video combines surrealistic images with Jakub Ciupinski’s The Black Mirror, written for us and featured on our recent album Mirrors. Enjoy!
Read MoreMusical America lauds the “diverse and strikingly inventive collection of 21st-century American works by the impressively dedicated Lysander Trio” while the BBC Music Magazine singles out the “highly evocative” Love Sweet cycle by Jennifer Higdon, featuring guest soprano Sarah Shafer.
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The Lysander Piano Trio (violinist Itamar Zorman, cellist Michael Katz, and pianist Liza Stepanova) announces the December 4, 2020 release of its new album mirrors on First Hand Records. mirrors celebrates the trio’s tenth anniversary with six world premiere recordings of 21st century American piano trios. Four of the trios, by Jakub Ciupinski, Reinaldo Moya, Gilad Cohen, and, Sofia Belimova, were commissioned by and written specifically for the Lysander, while the works by Jennifer Higdon and William David Cooper were premiered by members of the ensemble.
Over the past decade, the Lysander Piano Trio has shown a strong commitment to working with living composers and building new repertoire for the piano trio, yielding a great variety of musical styles from artists of multiple generations, diverse international backgrounds – Moya is Venezulean-American, Ciupinski is Polish-American, Belimova is Russian-American and Cohen is Israeli-American – and a broad range of interests. All of the compositions featured on mirrors are inspired by other art forms such as theatre, literature, and visual arts.
The trio is joined by acclaimed soprano Sarah Shafer on Higdon’s evocative song cycle, Love Sweet, a piece that expands the sparse repertoire for voice and piano trio. The trio regards Shafer – who has performed with The Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Glyndebourne, San Diego Opera, Tulsa Opera, and Opera Philadelphia – as a foremost chamber music and song interpreter of her generation. She frequently performs with pianist Richard Goode, who was an early mentor to her.
Of the album, the trio states, “2020 has presented many unexpected challenges, making an in-person celebration of our ensemble’s anniversary, not to mention the usual collaborations in which we engage, nearly impossible. Under these circumstances, we are particularly grateful to be able to share the fruits of some of our most meaningful collaborations in the form of this album. We believe that the works included on this album, in their richness of styles and origins, provide an exciting and optimistic glimpse into music being written for piano trio today.”
In The Black Mirror (2013-2014), Jakub Ciupinski takes inspiration from a technique in the visual arts, where the painter looks at a vast landscape through a compact mirror with a blackened surface and slightly convex shape. Also known as a “Claude glass,” named after 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the mirror can capture vast landscapes into a size of a small canvas while reducing the tonal range of the reflected scenery. Ciupinski reflects this musically through minimalism, and describes his work as "a small study of time, painted in dim colors.”
Jennifer Higdon’s Love Sweet (2014) for soprano and piano trio is a set of five songs on love poems by the American poet, Amy Lowell (1874–1925) from her collections Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914) and A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912). Jennifer Higdon writes, “The layout of the poetry reflects the trajectory of a relationship: from birth to death.” This world premiere recording celebrates a long and fruitful collaboration between the trio and Higdon. Notably, Zorman and Stepanova worked closely with her for the world premiere performance of Love Sweet at SongFest in 2014 (with a different cellist and soprano) and Higdon invited the trio in its current configuration to perform her Piano Trio at a special concert at National Sawdust honoring Joan Tower and featuring other distinguished women composers.
Venezuelan-American composer Reinaldo Moya’s Ghostwritten Variations (2015–2016) reflect Moya’s deep interest in literature. Moya takes his inspiration from four novels that feature composers as protagonists, and this trio is a reimagining of what the music of those fictional composers might sound like.
Variation 1. Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus – Adrian Leverkühn
Variation 2. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas – Robert Frobisher
Variation 3. Richard Powers: Orfeo – Peter Els
Variation 4. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Memory of Whiteness – Johannes Wright and The Orchestra
William David Cooper’s An den Wassern zu Babel (2010) is a set of variations inspired by Psalm 137, By the Rivers of Babylon. Cooper’s atonal harmonic language is highly expressive, evoking the sounds of early 20th-century German expressionism.
Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron (2016), co-commissioned by Concert Artists Guild and premiered at Weill Recital Hall in 2017 was inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and is influenced by popular music styles including psychedelic rock, grunge, and musical theater. It comprises seven short scenes, each of which evokes a mood that resonates with an image of three witches gathered around a cauldron in a dark forest, muttering spells and adding selected creatures to a bubbling stew.
Sofia Belimova’s Titania and Her Suite (2014) also draws upon Shakespeare, by way of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the fact that the Lysander Piano Trio is named after a character in the play, whose famous line, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” can be applied to the work of chamber ensembles. Just 13-years-old when she wrote this piece, Belimova was one of four young composers in the ComposerCraft program at New York City’s Kaufman Music Center (KMC) who were commissioned to write works to be premiered on the Lysander’s debut recital at KMC in 2014.
About Sarah Shafer: Praised by The New York Times for her “luminous voice” and “intensely expressive interpretations,” and named “remarkable, artistically mature” and “a singer to watch” by Opera News, American soprano Sarah Shafer performs with numerous opera companies including The Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Glyndebourne, San Diego Opera, Tulsa Opera, and Opera Philadelphia. Equally at home in standard and contemporary repertoire, she has created leading roles in world premiere productions with San Francisco Opera, and premiered works by renowned composers Richard Danielpour, John Harbison, and Poul Ruders. She has appeared with many orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Mexico, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. An avid chamber musician and recitalist, she regularly collaborates with pianist Richard Goode, and is sought after at chamber music societies throughout the United States. She spent five summers as a resident artist at the Marlboro Music Festival. Recordings include the premiere of Richard Danielpour’s chamber work, Talking to Aphrodit and Poul Ruder’s opera The Thirteenth Child. www.sarahshafersoprano.com.
Read new stories about the Trio's projects this spring and summer!
Read MoreHear the trio in two prelude concert performances at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival on August 12-13. The program pairs Joseph Haydn's striking Keyboard Trio in F-sharp minor with Franz Liszt's exuberant Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9.
Lysander Trio gave its European debut at the Copenhagen Summer Music Festival. The program, featuring works by Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Jakub Ciupinski, was met with an enthusiastic response. Watch a video of the live performance from the festival, featuring the encore work: Moshe Zorman's "Yemenite Fantasy":
The Washington Post gives a glowing review to the Trio's performance at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
“...an uncommon degree of heart-on-the-sleeve emotional frankness...the ensemble’s unanimity of approach — vivid engagement carried by soaring, ripely Romantic playing — proved quite splendid. Its performance possessed a passionate single-mindedness that wound up serving all of the score’s varied moods, right through to a finale of exhilarating panache. It’s not often that a chamber performance makes a listener long to hear all the ensemble members in the big-concerto repertoire, but this one certainly did.”
New York Times' critic Vivien Schweitzer praises the Trio's "polished and spirited" interpretations of the works by Turina, Haydn, Ravel, and Moshe Zorman.
Announcing the release of our debut CD "After A Dream" on CAG Records, Victor Elmaleh Collection!
A year in the making, our first record features works by Turina, Haydn, Schubert, Ravel, and Zorman in an exploration of fantasy, imagination, and color through a nocturnal lens.
A CD Release Concert will take place on September 15 at SubCulture, New York's premier venue for cutting-edge performance.
Recorded at Oktaven Studio in June 2013. Ryan Streber, recording engineer.
We are pleased to share a number of excellent reviews from the Trio's winter and spring concerts.
The New York Times, reviewing the Trio's Carnegie Weill Hall debut, calls the Trio "excellent...playing with passion and building tension" and praises the "finely hued collaboration among the three musicians."
The Strad, reviewing the Trio's earlier Merkin Hall debut praises the "...incredible ensemble, passionate playing, articulate and imaginative ideas and wide palette of colours. Performed with sensitivity, panache and emotional depth, it perfectly displayed the Lysander Trio's enormous potential."
The Lincoln Journal Star feels that "Mendelssohn would have loved the way the Lysander Piano Trio played [his D-minor Piano Trio]'
Read further reviews of our Carnegie Weill Hall recital debut from ConcertoNet and LucidCulture.
As winners of the 2012 Victor Elmaleh Competition, Concert Artists Guild will present us on their Concerts in New York series at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall on April 3, 2014 at 7:30pm!
Our exciting program features the World Premiere of Black Mirror, a CAG commission written for us by Jakub Ciupinski, a young Polish composer based in NYC. Other works include John Musto's Piano Trio (1998), one of the most highly praised contemporary works for our medium, and single-movement works by Schubert and Shostakovich. The evening concludes with the glorious C Major Piano Trio, Op. 87 by Johannes Brahms.
On January 14, 2014, the Trio will present its Kaufman Music Center recital debut as part of the Tuesday Matinees series at Merkin Recital Hall. A highlight of the colorful program: the world premiere of Four Movements from The Midsummer Night's Dream written especially for us by four brilliant students from the Kaufman Music Center's ComposerCraft program for middle schoolers: Mai Brown, Sofia Belimova, Kyrie McIntosh, and Paris Lavidis, under the guidance of their teacher, Robinson McClellan. Take a look at photos from our fun visit with ComposerCraft prior to the concert!
Update: many thanks to our fans for the wonderful turnout - the performance was sold out! And delighted about the review in The Strad magazine.
On January 16, 2012 at the Oracle Club in NYC, the Trio presented an exciting collaboration with author Susannah Cahalan eading from her stunning new memoir "Brain on Fire" praised by Booklist as one of 2012's Top 10 Science and Health book picks. Between readings, the Trio performed Shostakovich's intense Piano Trio No. 2, op. 67.
FROM THE BOOK DESCRIPTION: "One day in 2009, twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak....In this swift and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her inexplicable descent into madness and the brilliant, lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen."
The prize at this prestigious event includes a management contract with Concert Artists Guild, our Carnegie Weill Hall Recital Debut during the 2012-2013 Season, a Showcase Performance at the Chamber Music America Annual Conference on January 18, 2013, and more!
Visit Concert Artists Guild for more information about our new home!
Congratulations to composer William David Cooper for winning the ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award for his 2010 piano trio "An den Wassern zu Babel"!
We are excited to perform selections from the winning work (which was premiered by our pianist Liza Stepanova with members of the JACK Quartet) at the Annual Concert Music Awards Ceremony at Merkin Recital Hall at the Kaufman Center, NYC on May 24, 2012!
We are looking forward to perform at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall on May 8, 2012 as part of a benefit concert organized by the American Friends of the Lucerne Festival.
Program: Mendelssohn's exciting Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor.
We were honored to have been chosen as participants in a rare Alfred Brendel masterclass at The Juilliard School. The legendary pianist shared his lifelong experience with Franz Schubert's music as we performed the Notturno, D 897.
Judith Thurman shares her impressions of the class in a blog article in The New Yorker.
