Together from Paris
In chamber music, three is not a crowd.
The Paris Piano Trio, a music group consisting of a violin, a piano and a cello, came to Utah State University in the last performance of their October-November tour Monday night. They performed at the Eccles Conference Center, where nearly 300 people filled the seats to listen to their music.
The three men behind the instruments are Jean-Claude Pennetier, Roland Pidoux and Regis Pasquier.
Presented by the Chamber Music Society of Logan, they performed at the Eccles Conference Center for USU students and non-students alike. In nearly two hours they played three complete classical numbers by Franz Joseph Haydn, Ernest Chausson and Johannes Brahms.
After every song, as is common in chamber music, the performers walked offstage, on, and back off again to prepare for the next song. This tradition allowed them to shed one style of one song to embrace the next one with equal attention.
The songs themselves were diverse and varied in moods, and each of them were very representive of their composers.
With examples of distinct syncopation, chromatic harmonies and alternating meter, the concert represented the orchestral music of the 18th and 19th century.
“The choice of music was a good representation of different styles and different areas of music,” said freshman Tara Jean Spotten, a piano pedagogy major. “It was not only enjoyable, but also educational.”
“The music was great. I found myself at times getting lost in it,” said Cydni Orosco, a freshman majoring in public relations.
These French musicians have been playing music together for more than four decades, starting at the time when they were teenagers and students together at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris.
All of them started their music careers when they were just children. Since then, they’ve had a lot of time to play music together and become perfectly united in their music. The songs they played at the performance required exact precision, showing off their lifetime of practice.
“Their backgrounds are very admirable and I think they are the epitome of a professional classical trio,” Orosco said.
The Paris Piano Trio is based in Paris, where they are all now professors at the same school they were students at , but they have been touring world-wide for their entire lives. They have gone on tour to the United States since January 1998 as the Paris Piano Trio. While in Europe, they are known as Les Musiciens.
The trio has produced five CDs, available in the United States, and still continue to perform classical music around the world.
-maripark@cc.usu.edu