Gramophone Magazine
HAYDN Piano Trio in E, Hob XV:28. TURINA Circulo--Fantasy for Piano Trio, op. 91. SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio in e, op. 67
Icicle Creek Piano Trio, CON BRIO RECORDS 21048 (52:49).
Gramophone
Fanfare Magazine
HAYDN Piano Trio in E, Hob XV:28. TURINA Circulo--Fantasy for Piano Trio, op. 91. SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio in e, op. 67 " Icicle Creek Piano Trio " CON BRIO RECORDS 21048 (52:49)
Back in 32:5 I welcomed an album by the Icicle Creek Piano Trio on the specialty audiophile label Con Brio Records, an enterprise founded by Carol Greenley (whom I’d interviewed in 32:4) and her husband Ed Hollcraft. That release, containing piano trios by Schubert and Ravel, earned some of the highest accolades I’ve ever accorded a new CD in my years with this journal, and, not unexpectedly, it topped my 2009 Want List. That recording was, if I’m not mistaken, taped at the Canyon Wren Concert Hall in Leavenworth, Washington’s Icicle Creek Music Center, where the trio is the ensemble in residence and from which institution it obviously takes its name. For those who may not know, Leavenworth is a picturesque, touristy community done up to resemble a Bavarian village and situated near the eastern edge of Washington State’s Cascade mountain range about 80 miles due east of Seattle. This new release was recorded at a different venue, the ButterflyProduction.com Studio in Seattle, in February, 2010. The Icicle Creek Trio’s members are Jennifer Caine, violin; Sally Singer, cello; and Oksana Ezhokia, piano.
As complement to its previous album, the Icicle Creek ensemble gives us three contrasting piano trios that are not only quite different from each other and from the earlier recorded Schubert and Ravel trios but, in the case of two of them—the Haydn and Turina—I’d venture not that familiar. True, Haydn’s piano trios—all 45 of them—have been essayed on disc before, most notably perhaps by the Beaux Arts Trio in its 1970s groundbreaking cycle for Philips.
There are those who will say, though I’m not one of them, that if you’ve heard one Haydn trio you’ve heard them all, and that unless you’ve played them yourself or have a very sharp memory for detail, you’re not as likely to experience that “aha” moment of recognition as you are with other works by the composer that exhibit a more immediately distinctive profile. But the E-Major Trio, Hob XV:28, is one of the composer’s more frequently recorded trios, and if you acquired either the Florestan Trio’s version, reviewed as recently as 33:4 by Christopher Brodersen, or the Ensemble Trazom’s period instrument performance reviewed in 27:4 by James H. North, you are more likely than not to find the piece familiar. Moreover, it’s one of Haydn’s last works in the medium. Written in London in 1794–95 and dedicated to the talented pianist Thérèse Jansen, it contains some of the composer’s most advanced harmonic and contrapuntal writing. The E-Minor Allegretto built over a passacaglia-like bass line is especially unusual. It was only in these last trios that Haydn began to break away from the accepted understanding of the piano trio as a piano sonata with violin and cello accompaniment. It wasn’t until the string instruments were liberated from their supporting role and the piano began to give up its dominant position in the hierarchy that the piano trio came into its own in the hands of Beethoven.
Joaquin Turina’s piano trio titled Circulo has also had its fair share of recordings. A few have been reviewed in these pages—see the Fanfare archive under both “Turina” and “Turína,” but apparently not my longtime favorite with the Beaux Arts Trio on a Philips CD that includes the composer’s two other piano trios plus a trio by Granados. That performance of the Circulo Trio, wonderful as it is, must now cede pride of place to this new one by the Icicle Creek Trio which plays the piece as if spellbound by its mood painting. In three short movements—one might wish they were longer—Turina’s rapturous writing is intended to capture the changing sky colors and climates of the day—“Dawn,” “Midday,” and “Dusk.”
I don’t think it will upset too many readers if I say that Shostakovich’s E-Minor Trio is the greatest piano trio of the 20th-century. Some 75 recordings of the piece tend to support that opinion. But such fierce competition also makes it difficult for the Icicle Creek Trio—indeed, for any ensemble relatively new to the scene—to mark its territory amid the pack. But I can honestly say that the ICT’s Shostakovich is another award winning performance that, in my opinion, demotes even the best of the rest to second class.
The cello’s artificial harmonics at the beginning of the first movement shimmer like hoar-frost, as silvery as I’ve ever heard them. The entrances exchanged between the instruments in the second movement—one of those backbiting, nose-thumbing Shostakovich scherzos—are so perfectly timed and balanced, they’re like the workings of a Swiss watch. And those curling-iron, hairpin swells and diminuendos throughout are discharged like so much flatulence to pollute the air with gaseous gossip. The sullen, bleak tragedy of the Largo is given voice by Shostakovich in the form of that age-old lament composers from earliest times expressed in the falling progression of the chaconne. And here in the ICT’s performance, one hears the underlying foundation in stark relief. In the concluding Allegretto, never have I heard any ensemble make more of the dynamic contrasts or differentiate as sharply as the ICT does between various pizzicato techniques, some soft and fleshy, others hard and percussive.
I’ve counted other versions of the Shostakovich among my favorites—those by the Kempf, Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson, Jupiter Trios, and an Erato recording with Repin, Berezovsky, and Yablonsky—but this is simply one fantastic performance, and it would earn my strongest recommendation even if the Shostakovich were the only work on the disc. But it’s not. The Turina is wonderful too, in different ways of course, and the Haydn is given a polished and spirited reading. Con Brio’s latest Icicle Creek Piano Trio album is a must for all chamber music lovers.
--Jerry Dubins, Fanfare Magazine, April/May 2011
Back in 32:5 I welcomed an album by the Icicle Creek Piano Trio on the specialty audiophile label Con Brio Records, an enterprise founded by Carol Greenley (whom I’d interviewed in 32:4) and her husband Ed Hollcraft. That release, containing piano trios by Schubert and Ravel, earned some of the highest accolades I’ve ever accorded a new CD in my years with this journal, and, not unexpectedly, it topped my 2009 Want List. That recording was, if I’m not mistaken, taped at the Canyon Wren Concert Hall in Leavenworth, Washington’s Icicle Creek Music Center, where the trio is the ensemble in residence and from which institution it obviously takes its name. For those who may not know, Leavenworth is a picturesque, touristy community done up to resemble a Bavarian village and situated near the eastern edge of Washington State’s Cascade mountain range about 80 miles due east of Seattle. This new release was recorded at a different venue, the ButterflyProduction.com Studio in Seattle, in February, 2010. The Icicle Creek Trio’s members are Jennifer Caine, violin; Sally Singer, cello; and Oksana Ezhokia, piano.
As complement to its previous album, the Icicle Creek ensemble gives us three contrasting piano trios that are not only quite different from each other and from the earlier recorded Schubert and Ravel trios but, in the case of two of them—the Haydn and Turina—I’d venture not that familiar. True, Haydn’s piano trios—all 45 of them—have been essayed on disc before, most notably perhaps by the Beaux Arts Trio in its 1970s groundbreaking cycle for Philips.
There are those who will say, though I’m not one of them, that if you’ve heard one Haydn trio you’ve heard them all, and that unless you’ve played them yourself or have a very sharp memory for detail, you’re not as likely to experience that “aha” moment of recognition as you are with other works by the composer that exhibit a more immediately distinctive profile. But the E-Major Trio, Hob XV:28, is one of the composer’s more frequently recorded trios, and if you acquired either the Florestan Trio’s version, reviewed as recently as 33:4 by Christopher Brodersen, or the Ensemble Trazom’s period instrument performance reviewed in 27:4 by James H. North, you are more likely than not to find the piece familiar. Moreover, it’s one of Haydn’s last works in the medium. Written in London in 1794–95 and dedicated to the talented pianist Thérèse Jansen, it contains some of the composer’s most advanced harmonic and contrapuntal writing. The E-Minor Allegretto built over a passacaglia-like bass line is especially unusual. It was only in these last trios that Haydn began to break away from the accepted understanding of the piano trio as a piano sonata with violin and cello accompaniment. It wasn’t until the string instruments were liberated from their supporting role and the piano began to give up its dominant position in the hierarchy that the piano trio came into its own in the hands of Beethoven.
Joaquin Turina’s piano trio titled Circulo has also had its fair share of recordings. A few have been reviewed in these pages—see the Fanfare archive under both “Turina” and “Turína,” but apparently not my longtime favorite with the Beaux Arts Trio on a Philips CD that includes the composer’s two other piano trios plus a trio by Granados. That performance of the Circulo Trio, wonderful as it is, must now cede pride of place to this new one by the Icicle Creek Trio which plays the piece as if spellbound by its mood painting. In three short movements—one might wish they were longer—Turina’s rapturous writing is intended to capture the changing sky colors and climates of the day—“Dawn,” “Midday,” and “Dusk.”
I don’t think it will upset too many readers if I say that Shostakovich’s E-Minor Trio is the greatest piano trio of the 20th-century. Some 75 recordings of the piece tend to support that opinion. But such fierce competition also makes it difficult for the Icicle Creek Trio—indeed, for any ensemble relatively new to the scene—to mark its territory amid the pack. But I can honestly say that the ICT’s Shostakovich is another award winning performance that, in my opinion, demotes even the best of the rest to second class.
The cello’s artificial harmonics at the beginning of the first movement shimmer like hoar-frost, as silvery as I’ve ever heard them. The entrances exchanged between the instruments in the second movement—one of those backbiting, nose-thumbing Shostakovich scherzos—are so perfectly timed and balanced, they’re like the workings of a Swiss watch. And those curling-iron, hairpin swells and diminuendos throughout are discharged like so much flatulence to pollute the air with gaseous gossip. The sullen, bleak tragedy of the Largo is given voice by Shostakovich in the form of that age-old lament composers from earliest times expressed in the falling progression of the chaconne. And here in the ICT’s performance, one hears the underlying foundation in stark relief. In the concluding Allegretto, never have I heard any ensemble make more of the dynamic contrasts or differentiate as sharply as the ICT does between various pizzicato techniques, some soft and fleshy, others hard and percussive.
I’ve counted other versions of the Shostakovich among my favorites—those by the Kempf, Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson, Jupiter Trios, and an Erato recording with Repin, Berezovsky, and Yablonsky—but this is simply one fantastic performance, and it would earn my strongest recommendation even if the Shostakovich were the only work on the disc. But it’s not. The Turina is wonderful too, in different ways of course, and the Haydn is given a polished and spirited reading. Con Brio’s latest Icicle Creek Piano Trio album is a must for all chamber music lovers.
--Jerry Dubins, Fanfare Magazine, April/May 2011
The Strad Magazine
Fanfare Magazine
RAVEL Piano Trio in a. SCHUBERT Piano Trio in E♭ • Icicle Creek Pn Tr • CON BRIO 28453 (68:07)
Long before I was a Fanfare contributor, I was a loyal reader, as I still am; and as a reader, one of my petty grievances against all such review journals—whether of recordings or of audio equipment—was, and still is, the predictable supersession of “bests” from one issue to the next. If, for example, on the recommendation of the audio critic, you run out and buy the $10,000 reference series Golden Ear amplifier, you can count on another audio critic, or perhaps even the same one, telling you in the next issue that the $12,000 Platinum Ear amplifier is even better. And so, having invested a goodly portion of your life’s savings on the first recommendation, you now feel your investment bested and devalued. It’s the same with recordings, and as a party to the never-ending game of one-upmanship, I am as guilty as others are in constantly upping the ante. The two fixed constants in this are that (1) there never was, and there never will be, such a thing as a “definitive” performance of anything; and (2) serious music-lovers and collectors will never end their quest for the “definitive” performance of a favorite work, which is why we acquire the same piece over and over again, performed by different artists, ensembles, and conductors.
I offer this preamble as an apology, for I am about to tell you that any past recommendations I may have made for recordings of Schubert’s E♭-Major Piano Trio are hereby rendered null and void by this new release. The performance by the Icicle Creek Trio comes as close to being “definitive” as any I expect to hear in my lifetime. However, before you run out and buy it on my say-so, I must note one issue that will undoubtedly be viewed as a fatal flaw by sticklers for repeats. The Icicle Creek Trio bypasses the lengthy repeat of the first movement exposition. I am not as bothered by this in some of Schubert’s works—his piano trios and Ninth Symphony, for example—as I am by such omissions in works with shorter expositions and less repetitious material. But this is a personal quirk.
If you can get past this one shortcoming, you will find a performance that transcends all the usual plaudits of pitch-perfect intonation, ideal pacing, polished ensemble playing, and even interpretive insight and musical intelligence. There is something both magical and exalted happening here, a communing of spirits so sensitive and responsive to every nuance of expression that three souls merge into one, and only one voice is heard: Schubert’s. It may be an odd way to describe a musical performance, but I felt as though a reading this beautiful should only exist in an otherworldly state of moral perfection and pure grace.
In a 32:4 interview with Carol Greenley of Con Brio Records, I engaged her in a conversation about the company she and her husband founded, about their recording philosophy and methodologies, their roster of artists, their repertoire, and the difficulties of keeping a small business afloat in these troubled economic times. The piece did not involve a review of any of their CDs, as none was sent, nor had I heard any up to that time. So this is the first Con Brio release I’ve had an opportunity to audition, and I would have to say that the otherworldly state of moral perfection and pure grace I alluded to above may have as much to do with the recording as it does with the Icicle Creek Trio. I cannot tell you in technical terms what engineer/producer/editor Al Swanson has done, or even, for that matter, with any certainty what the February 2008 venue for the recording was (I assume it was the Canyon Wren Concert Hall in Leavenworth, Washington’s Icicle Creek Music Center, where the trio is the ensemble in residence), because none of this information is provided on the jewel case’s back-plate or in the rather skimpy enclosed booklet note. I’m not even sure if the recording was made during a live performance or following one in which the same program was presented. But the results are astonishing. Without a doubt, this recording captures the stage in one of the most transparent, lifelike sonic images I’ve yet to hear. It’s as if the musicians, having been teleported from the recording session, simply materialize in my living room.
Equally astonishing is the fact that this is the Icicle Creek Trio’s debut album, though they are already seasoned players, having toured in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.K.; and having performed in venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alice Tully Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, and Davies Hall in San Francisco. Members of the group hail from the U.S. (violinist Jennifer Caine), the U.K. (cellist Sally Singer), and Russia (pianist Oksana Ezhokina).
It has not been my intent to give short shrift to Ravel’s 1914 A-Minor Piano Trio that leads off the disc. It is probably his most significant chamber music work, after his F-Major String Quartet, a conclusion borne out at least by the attention it has received on disc. Faced with the same dilemma of instrumental blend and balance that perplexed Tchaikovsky in his one and only piano trio, coincidentally in the same key, Ravel extends the coloristic effects he employed in his earlier quartet—such as glissandos, harmonics, and arpeggios—to differentiate the voices. Additionally, he separates the violin and cello by two or more octaves and “sandwiches” the piano between them in order to overcome the common problem of keyboard dominance. Everything I’ve said above about the Icicle Trio’s playing and recording in the Schubert applies in the Ravel. This is a chamber ensemble I look forward to hearing soon in much more of the mainstream piano trio repertoire. A five-star recommendation.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins, 2009
RAVEL Piano Trio in a. SCHUBERT Piano Trio in E♭ • Icicle Creek Pn Tr • CON BRIO 28453 (68:07)
Long before I was a Fanfare contributor, I was a loyal reader, as I still am; and as a reader, one of my petty grievances against all such review journals—whether of recordings or of audio equipment—was, and still is, the predictable supersession of “bests” from one issue to the next. If, for example, on the recommendation of the audio critic, you run out and buy the $10,000 reference series Golden Ear amplifier, you can count on another audio critic, or perhaps even the same one, telling you in the next issue that the $12,000 Platinum Ear amplifier is even better. And so, having invested a goodly portion of your life’s savings on the first recommendation, you now feel your investment bested and devalued. It’s the same with recordings, and as a party to the never-ending game of one-upmanship, I am as guilty as others are in constantly upping the ante. The two fixed constants in this are that (1) there never was, and there never will be, such a thing as a “definitive” performance of anything; and (2) serious music-lovers and collectors will never end their quest for the “definitive” performance of a favorite work, which is why we acquire the same piece over and over again, performed by different artists, ensembles, and conductors.
I offer this preamble as an apology, for I am about to tell you that any past recommendations I may have made for recordings of Schubert’s E♭-Major Piano Trio are hereby rendered null and void by this new release. The performance by the Icicle Creek Trio comes as close to being “definitive” as any I expect to hear in my lifetime. However, before you run out and buy it on my say-so, I must note one issue that will undoubtedly be viewed as a fatal flaw by sticklers for repeats. The Icicle Creek Trio bypasses the lengthy repeat of the first movement exposition. I am not as bothered by this in some of Schubert’s works—his piano trios and Ninth Symphony, for example—as I am by such omissions in works with shorter expositions and less repetitious material. But this is a personal quirk.
If you can get past this one shortcoming, you will find a performance that transcends all the usual plaudits of pitch-perfect intonation, ideal pacing, polished ensemble playing, and even interpretive insight and musical intelligence. There is something both magical and exalted happening here, a communing of spirits so sensitive and responsive to every nuance of expression that three souls merge into one, and only one voice is heard: Schubert’s. It may be an odd way to describe a musical performance, but I felt as though a reading this beautiful should only exist in an otherworldly state of moral perfection and pure grace.
In a 32:4 interview with Carol Greenley of Con Brio Records, I engaged her in a conversation about the company she and her husband founded, about their recording philosophy and methodologies, their roster of artists, their repertoire, and the difficulties of keeping a small business afloat in these troubled economic times. The piece did not involve a review of any of their CDs, as none was sent, nor had I heard any up to that time. So this is the first Con Brio release I’ve had an opportunity to audition, and I would have to say that the otherworldly state of moral perfection and pure grace I alluded to above may have as much to do with the recording as it does with the Icicle Creek Trio. I cannot tell you in technical terms what engineer/producer/editor Al Swanson has done, or even, for that matter, with any certainty what the February 2008 venue for the recording was (I assume it was the Canyon Wren Concert Hall in Leavenworth, Washington’s Icicle Creek Music Center, where the trio is the ensemble in residence), because none of this information is provided on the jewel case’s back-plate or in the rather skimpy enclosed booklet note. I’m not even sure if the recording was made during a live performance or following one in which the same program was presented. But the results are astonishing. Without a doubt, this recording captures the stage in one of the most transparent, lifelike sonic images I’ve yet to hear. It’s as if the musicians, having been teleported from the recording session, simply materialize in my living room.
Equally astonishing is the fact that this is the Icicle Creek Trio’s debut album, though they are already seasoned players, having toured in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.K.; and having performed in venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alice Tully Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, and Davies Hall in San Francisco. Members of the group hail from the U.S. (violinist Jennifer Caine), the U.K. (cellist Sally Singer), and Russia (pianist Oksana Ezhokina).
It has not been my intent to give short shrift to Ravel’s 1914 A-Minor Piano Trio that leads off the disc. It is probably his most significant chamber music work, after his F-Major String Quartet, a conclusion borne out at least by the attention it has received on disc. Faced with the same dilemma of instrumental blend and balance that perplexed Tchaikovsky in his one and only piano trio, coincidentally in the same key, Ravel extends the coloristic effects he employed in his earlier quartet—such as glissandos, harmonics, and arpeggios—to differentiate the voices. Additionally, he separates the violin and cello by two or more octaves and “sandwiches” the piano between them in order to overcome the common problem of keyboard dominance. Everything I’ve said above about the Icicle Trio’s playing and recording in the Schubert applies in the Ravel. This is a chamber ensemble I look forward to hearing soon in much more of the mainstream piano trio repertoire. A five-star recommendation.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins, 2009
The Gathering Note, Classical music in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and elsewhere
"Shining Seattle debut of The Icicle Creek Piano Trio", June 1st, 2009 | Author: Philippa Kiraly
Any of us who hike know where Icicle Creek is. So do musical devotees who make the trek over the mountains to the Icicle Creek Music Center for concerts or a festival near Leavenworth. But we haven’t had its resident chamber ensemble, The Icicle Creek Piano Trio, come the other way to perform here in Seattle until Saturday night when it gave a concert of music by Turina, Clara Schumann and Shostakovich Downstairs at Town Hall.
The group’s quality has been heralded by the recent release of its CD of Ravel and Schubert, which has received rave reviews from Gramophone, Strad and Fanfare magazines and the American Record Guide, rare for a debut recording. More about this down the page.
Concert-goers Saturday were not disappointed. America’s Jennifer Caine, violin, England’s Sally Singer, cello, and Russia’s Oksana Ezhokina, piano, play with that sensitivity to each other which comes usually with years of playing together. Singer never seemed even to look at the others, she seemed to have her eyes shut, yet she and the others over and over would come in at exactly the same moment with the same artful shaping and dynamic of a particular phrase. It was as though they breathed together. It’s intelligent playing, with each work receiving attention to its era as well as its composer and its overarching structure.
The hors d’oeuvre of the concert, Turina’s “Circulo” for Piano Trio had a lightness and charm, with a dancing energy in the middle movement that made you want to get moving in time to it, and a lyricism which owed much to the Iberian romanticism of the piece.
Hearing Clara Schumann’s only piano trio, in G Minor, serves to show up how much we have lost over the centuries by the dismissal of women composers. Only a few managed to get past the shibboleths of their era. I hope that somewhere in dusty attics there are more works to be discovered by such women as Fanny Mendelssohn and Schumann or their predecessors of earlier centuries.
Schumann’s trio is a work which can stand beside those of her husband, or Brahms, or any other of the famous male composers of the day. It’s gorgeous music, thematically and harmonically beautiful and developed with fresh ideas, drama and feeling, all of which the Icicles brought out. Although we always associate Schumann solely with the piano, she writes rewardingly for strings, and this is no piano solo with string accompaniment.
Caine and Singer draw such similar tone qualities that their instruments sound like a matched pair. Each, and Ezhokina on the piano, plays so that her tone sounds as deep as a well. Within that depth they create all sorts of nuance to color the music, the string players including in that a use of vibrato which is truly an ornament, varied according to the mood which they want to achieve, while Ezhokina’s touch is always sensitive to the composer’s intent. All three play very softly in a way that sings, neither breathy in the strings or tentative, and they also don’t equate loudness and fierceness with banging on the keys or sawing on the strings.
This was particularly notable in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in E Minor, from 1944, only eight years in time after the Turina but light years away in emotion.
I’ve always felt that to play Shostakovich and grasp what the composer is saying, the players have to have lived under oppression. Many years ago a player from a traveling Russian youth symphony told me that they because they could not speak their feelings in the country, they ended up being played out on their instruments. We are fortunate that in this area we have many musicians who grew up in Russia before glasnost, and thanks to their input, we do hear memorable Shostakovich performances.
This was one of them. While the earlier movements are sunnier and have less than the composer’s usual undercurrents, they are arrestingly original, beginning with the cello’s soft, high harmonics at the start. There’s a feeling later of hurried, trudging feet but not of fear or doom such as you find in others of Shostakovich’s work, while the third movement feels like an elegy and a memory. As the Icicles played the last movement, it unfolded full of resistance, anger and frustration being danced out, with sadness underlying all. There was a sense of a simmering pot, and, finally resignation. It was vivid, emotional and never lost shape as a musical work. This was fine artistry.
The CD, on Con Brio Recordings, is superb. All of the musicians’ above-mentioned attributes pertain. Their playing of Ravel’s only Piano Trio is as fine an interpretation as I ever hope to hear, while Schubert’s E-flat Trio is drop-dead beautiful. The second movement in particular is ravishing, played with a tenderness which brings a lump to the throat, though there is nothing sentimental about it.
So make your way to Icicle Creek this summer, hike first and take in a concert in the evening and listen to this terrific ensemble.
--The Gathering Note, 2009
Any of us who hike know where Icicle Creek is. So do musical devotees who make the trek over the mountains to the Icicle Creek Music Center for concerts or a festival near Leavenworth. But we haven’t had its resident chamber ensemble, The Icicle Creek Piano Trio, come the other way to perform here in Seattle until Saturday night when it gave a concert of music by Turina, Clara Schumann and Shostakovich Downstairs at Town Hall.
The group’s quality has been heralded by the recent release of its CD of Ravel and Schubert, which has received rave reviews from Gramophone, Strad and Fanfare magazines and the American Record Guide, rare for a debut recording. More about this down the page.
Concert-goers Saturday were not disappointed. America’s Jennifer Caine, violin, England’s Sally Singer, cello, and Russia’s Oksana Ezhokina, piano, play with that sensitivity to each other which comes usually with years of playing together. Singer never seemed even to look at the others, she seemed to have her eyes shut, yet she and the others over and over would come in at exactly the same moment with the same artful shaping and dynamic of a particular phrase. It was as though they breathed together. It’s intelligent playing, with each work receiving attention to its era as well as its composer and its overarching structure.
The hors d’oeuvre of the concert, Turina’s “Circulo” for Piano Trio had a lightness and charm, with a dancing energy in the middle movement that made you want to get moving in time to it, and a lyricism which owed much to the Iberian romanticism of the piece.
Hearing Clara Schumann’s only piano trio, in G Minor, serves to show up how much we have lost over the centuries by the dismissal of women composers. Only a few managed to get past the shibboleths of their era. I hope that somewhere in dusty attics there are more works to be discovered by such women as Fanny Mendelssohn and Schumann or their predecessors of earlier centuries.
Schumann’s trio is a work which can stand beside those of her husband, or Brahms, or any other of the famous male composers of the day. It’s gorgeous music, thematically and harmonically beautiful and developed with fresh ideas, drama and feeling, all of which the Icicles brought out. Although we always associate Schumann solely with the piano, she writes rewardingly for strings, and this is no piano solo with string accompaniment.
Caine and Singer draw such similar tone qualities that their instruments sound like a matched pair. Each, and Ezhokina on the piano, plays so that her tone sounds as deep as a well. Within that depth they create all sorts of nuance to color the music, the string players including in that a use of vibrato which is truly an ornament, varied according to the mood which they want to achieve, while Ezhokina’s touch is always sensitive to the composer’s intent. All three play very softly in a way that sings, neither breathy in the strings or tentative, and they also don’t equate loudness and fierceness with banging on the keys or sawing on the strings.
This was particularly notable in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in E Minor, from 1944, only eight years in time after the Turina but light years away in emotion.
I’ve always felt that to play Shostakovich and grasp what the composer is saying, the players have to have lived under oppression. Many years ago a player from a traveling Russian youth symphony told me that they because they could not speak their feelings in the country, they ended up being played out on their instruments. We are fortunate that in this area we have many musicians who grew up in Russia before glasnost, and thanks to their input, we do hear memorable Shostakovich performances.
This was one of them. While the earlier movements are sunnier and have less than the composer’s usual undercurrents, they are arrestingly original, beginning with the cello’s soft, high harmonics at the start. There’s a feeling later of hurried, trudging feet but not of fear or doom such as you find in others of Shostakovich’s work, while the third movement feels like an elegy and a memory. As the Icicles played the last movement, it unfolded full of resistance, anger and frustration being danced out, with sadness underlying all. There was a sense of a simmering pot, and, finally resignation. It was vivid, emotional and never lost shape as a musical work. This was fine artistry.
The CD, on Con Brio Recordings, is superb. All of the musicians’ above-mentioned attributes pertain. Their playing of Ravel’s only Piano Trio is as fine an interpretation as I ever hope to hear, while Schubert’s E-flat Trio is drop-dead beautiful. The second movement in particular is ravishing, played with a tenderness which brings a lump to the throat, though there is nothing sentimental about it.
So make your way to Icicle Creek this summer, hike first and take in a concert in the evening and listen to this terrific ensemble.
--The Gathering Note, 2009
Seattle Times
Icicle Creek Piano Trio celebrates its new CD with a free concert at Town Hall in Seattle on Friday, March 4th, 2011.
By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times arts writer
Cellist Sally Singer, left; violinist Jennifer Caine; and pianist Oksana Ezhokina.
Concert preview: Icicle CreekPiano Trio
Works by Haydn, Turina and Shostakovich.
Maybe there's something in the water in Leavenworth — or at least in a rocky stream there called Icicle Creek. Because the musical fare coming from the Icicle Creek Piano Trio, the ensemble-in-residence at the mountain town's Icicle Creek Music Center, couldn't be of more pure or exquisite quality.
Good reason, then, not to miss the trio's free CD-release concert at Town Hall on Friday, where they'll perform excerpts from their latest recording.
The trio — violinist Jennifer Caine, cellist Sally Singer, pianist Oksana Ezhokina — made a big impression a couple of years ago with their debut CD, pairing piano trios by Ravel and Schubert. It won raves in Gramophone and Fanfare magazines, and its follow-up, featuring works by Haydn, Turina and Shostakovich, is being greeted with equal rapture.
It's clear from the pizzicato opening of the Haydn Piano Trio in E Major, Hob. SV: 28, that there's something both pristine and playful in the way these gifted musicians deliver the goods. The middle allegretto movement, with its "walking bass line" on the keyboard, is an even more elegant treat.
Joaquin Turina's "Circulo — Fantasy for Piano, Violin, and Cello" is in an impressionist vein, with a swaying, sweeping range to it — and some feisty, marchlike vigor in its central movement. But it's on the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, that Caine, Singer and Ezhokina shine most dazzlingly. They subtly nail the somber, meditative passages of its first and third movements and are equally adept at the folk-flavored dance rhythms of the second and fourth movements. You can never have enough good recordings of Shostakovich No. 2 — and this is a great one. The trio's short concert will be followed by CD sales and signing, and a reception with Champagne, cider and cookies.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times arts writer
Cellist Sally Singer, left; violinist Jennifer Caine; and pianist Oksana Ezhokina.
Concert preview: Icicle CreekPiano Trio
Works by Haydn, Turina and Shostakovich.
Maybe there's something in the water in Leavenworth — or at least in a rocky stream there called Icicle Creek. Because the musical fare coming from the Icicle Creek Piano Trio, the ensemble-in-residence at the mountain town's Icicle Creek Music Center, couldn't be of more pure or exquisite quality.
Good reason, then, not to miss the trio's free CD-release concert at Town Hall on Friday, where they'll perform excerpts from their latest recording.
The trio — violinist Jennifer Caine, cellist Sally Singer, pianist Oksana Ezhokina — made a big impression a couple of years ago with their debut CD, pairing piano trios by Ravel and Schubert. It won raves in Gramophone and Fanfare magazines, and its follow-up, featuring works by Haydn, Turina and Shostakovich, is being greeted with equal rapture.
It's clear from the pizzicato opening of the Haydn Piano Trio in E Major, Hob. SV: 28, that there's something both pristine and playful in the way these gifted musicians deliver the goods. The middle allegretto movement, with its "walking bass line" on the keyboard, is an even more elegant treat.
Joaquin Turina's "Circulo — Fantasy for Piano, Violin, and Cello" is in an impressionist vein, with a swaying, sweeping range to it — and some feisty, marchlike vigor in its central movement. But it's on the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, that Caine, Singer and Ezhokina shine most dazzlingly. They subtly nail the somber, meditative passages of its first and third movements and are equally adept at the folk-flavored dance rhythms of the second and fourth movements. You can never have enough good recordings of Shostakovich No. 2 — and this is a great one. The trio's short concert will be followed by CD sales and signing, and a reception with Champagne, cider and cookies.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
Live sonata performance review:
Seattle Times
Chamber Music in Surround Sound
LEAVENWORTH, Chelan County — What, no barn?
Indeed not.
What the Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival has instead is a gem of a concert hall with a miracle of a view. When you take a seat in Canyon Wren Recital Hall, you find yourself looking through a Cinerama-size, multipaneled picture window at Sleeping Lady, the sloping peak that lends the nearby Leavenworth resort its name.
The musicians often occupy a raised stage between you and the glorious vista. It may initially seem foolhardy of them to compete with such a magnificent setting — but once they strike their first notes, your eyes are on them as much as the mountain spectacle...
By the time the concert closed with a Rachmaninoff sonata (cellist Sally Singer in seamless, pulsing sync with festival artistic director Oksana Ezhokina on keyboards), the mountains were in silhouette and the audience was sublimely happy.
Icicle Creek Music Center isn't just home to the festival but to a year-round concert season programmed by Ezhokina, with the Icicle Creek Piano Trio as its ensemble in residence. The trio — comprising Ezhokina, Singer and violinist Jennifer Caine — is a draw in itself. They have two fine CDs to their credit on the Con Brio label, featuring fare that ranges from Schubert to Shostakovich.
I got a partial sample of their in-concert magic when Singer and Ezhokina paired up on the Rachmaninoff — not a composer I'm crazy about. But in their hands, the continual surge and ebb of the piece made an exacting architectural sense as well as an emotional sense. Ezhokina's supple sway on the keyboards dovetailed beautifully with Singer's protean precision on the cello.
The big Rachmaninoff cascades were there but so was an anchoring low Rachmaninoff rumble. At the crisp close of the second movement — a moto perpetuo affair, with the "moto" continually veering around tight bends — the audience audibly registered its pleasure with a sharp collective gasp.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
July 2011
Indeed not.
What the Icicle Creek Chamber Music Festival has instead is a gem of a concert hall with a miracle of a view. When you take a seat in Canyon Wren Recital Hall, you find yourself looking through a Cinerama-size, multipaneled picture window at Sleeping Lady, the sloping peak that lends the nearby Leavenworth resort its name.
The musicians often occupy a raised stage between you and the glorious vista. It may initially seem foolhardy of them to compete with such a magnificent setting — but once they strike their first notes, your eyes are on them as much as the mountain spectacle...
By the time the concert closed with a Rachmaninoff sonata (cellist Sally Singer in seamless, pulsing sync with festival artistic director Oksana Ezhokina on keyboards), the mountains were in silhouette and the audience was sublimely happy.
Icicle Creek Music Center isn't just home to the festival but to a year-round concert season programmed by Ezhokina, with the Icicle Creek Piano Trio as its ensemble in residence. The trio — comprising Ezhokina, Singer and violinist Jennifer Caine — is a draw in itself. They have two fine CDs to their credit on the Con Brio label, featuring fare that ranges from Schubert to Shostakovich.
I got a partial sample of their in-concert magic when Singer and Ezhokina paired up on the Rachmaninoff — not a composer I'm crazy about. But in their hands, the continual surge and ebb of the piece made an exacting architectural sense as well as an emotional sense. Ezhokina's supple sway on the keyboards dovetailed beautifully with Singer's protean precision on the cello.
The big Rachmaninoff cascades were there but so was an anchoring low Rachmaninoff rumble. At the crisp close of the second movement — a moto perpetuo affair, with the "moto" continually veering around tight bends — the audience audibly registered its pleasure with a sharp collective gasp.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
July 2011