O/Modernt 10 years – Ghost Trio

The ensemble O/Modernt is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with chamber music by Beethoven, Fauré, Ravel and Schnelzer

The string ensemble O/Modernt is part of the acclaimed festival by the same name. It is now celebrating ten years, beginning with a chamber music celebration in Grünewald Hall.

O/Modernt’s founder, violinist Hugo Ticciati, will be accompanied by friends Alasdair Beatson on piano and Julian Arp on cello in a series of piano trios. The evening will begin with Beethoven’s Trio in D Major, whose eerie atmosphere, peculiar harmonies and extreme dynamics have given it the nickname the Ghost Trio. Beethoven was inspired by Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

The concert will then take a dive into the twentieth century and explore Fauré’s Mozart-like Piano Trio in D Minor. We will also hear Ravel’s Piano Trio, composed just after the beginning of World War I. He wrote it quickly so that he could enlist in the army where he worked as an ambulance driver.

During the ten years of its existence O/Modernt has been tireless in its support of new music, and it’s therefore fitting that the programme should be completed with Albert Schnelzer’s Predatory Dances, the final part in a ten-movement ‘dance’ suite. The predator’s attacking instinct of patient waiting and sudden pouncing is explored in the juxtaposition of sections of harmonic stasis and passages of rhythmic aggression. On another level this duality is a musical image of the play of good and evil in the theatrical stage of life.

This concert is held with support from Goethe-Institut Schweden.