The Prizm Trio – Gabriela Mayer (piano), Maria Ryan (violin) and Aoife Nic Athlaoich (cello) – performs piano trios by Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Spanish composer Joaquín Turina.

The Prizm Trio is a chamber group founded in 2017 by professional musicians who are committed to bringing live music and innovative programs to audiences in a new format – combining pieces with different combinations of instruments built around cultural connections: identity, self-expression and individual stories presented through the prism of music. The paths of the ensemble members crisscross many countries, and they bring their artistic experience as performers and educators to this partnership. They are all based in Cork and teach at the MTU Cork School of Music.

Programme:

Turina: Piano Trio No. 1 in D major, Op. 35
Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8
Debussy: Piano Trio in G major, L. 3

Claude Debussy's Piano Trio in G major bears out this preference for lightness and clarity. Certainly all three players have their opportunities for tunes and for a certain amount of display. To modern ears it sounds nothing like the mature Debussy; more, at times, like Delibes, whose music was a mainstay of the Conservatoire score-reading class and was, moreover, highly approved by Tchaikovsky. The second movement, in particular, conjures up visions of footlights and tutus, its pizzicatos serving as a kind of mid-point between Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Debussy’s String Quartet.

Shostakovich wrote his Piano Trio No 1 (‘Poème’) in 1923, when he was sixteen, and had already spent three years as a student at the Conservatoire in St Petersburg. Already, this student work contains recognizable Shostakovich hallmarks: lyrical melodies coloured by acerbic harmonies, sudden contrasts of pace and energy, insistent rhythms, and spare textures giving way to unashamedly romantic passages and powerful climaxes.

The Piano Trio No 1 is an imaginative mixture of the learned style Joaquín Turina acquired in Paris and folkloric inspiration provided by his homeland. The first movement is a prelude and fugue, blending the techniques of the French School with those of German masters such as Bach. The second movement is a theme and variations, with each variation evoking a dance from a different region of Spain: the muñeira from Galicia; the zortziko of the Basque region; the jota of Aragon; and the soleares of Turina’s native Andalucia.