The Desautels Faculty of Music’s artists in residence have chosen a seemingly unlikely pairing for their latest concert.
On the one hand, you have the stalwart Ludwig van Beethoven, whose String Trio in G major, op. 9, no. 1 bears all the hallmarks of the composer’s so-called first period. On the other, you have Kintsugi for Piano Trio, whose composer, New Zealand’s Salina Fisher, was born just shy of two centuries after the string trio was written.
These are the pieces that will be featured in the latest concert by the Clearwater Ensemble. The group is comprised of some of Winnipeg’s most prominent classical musicians, including Gwen Hoebig and Karl Stobbe, concertmasters of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, respectively.
While the two pieces might seem miles apart, Stobbe sees the link between them as both being intimate chamber music offerings. “There’s just three people and they’re talking to each other and they’re having a conversation within themselves that people get to be a part of.”
The youth of Fisher’s piece also pairs with the relative youth of Beethoven when he composed his string trio in 1797, when he was 27 years old. “The style is fairly similar in that it’s young, so there’s a lot of life in it,” explains Hoebig. “There’s a lot of optimism in both of these pieces.”
The optimism of Kintsugi comes from the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery, from which the work’s title is derived. “Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent,” says Fisher in the piece’s program note. “The object is more beautiful for having been broken.”
Hoebig notes that for the Clearwater Ensemble, whose members have been sharing works by composers like Beethoven for their entire careers, the experience of playing music by a composer from the next generation is a liberating one. “When we play something by Beethoven… there are so many traditions. You bring your own stamp to it, but it’s pretty much all been said. That doesn’t mean that you don’t want to go hear it again, because it’s such great music.”
“When you get something like Salina’s piece, there’s still a whole world of exploration that musicians can do with it because it does not have the history that a Beethoven has. So that’s also very exciting for us.”
The Clearwater Ensemble’s latest program will be presented at 12:30 p.m. at the University of Manitoba’s Eva Clare Hall. More information can be found at the Desautels Faculty of Music’s website.