Trio BelleSon Shanghai

The opening is formed by Meditation for piano trio by the young Chinese composer Liu Junhao – a work written especially for the ensemble, a concentrated sonic sketch full of lyrical calm and clear lines. At the center of the first part stands Claude Debussy’s only Piano Trio in G major, a seldom-performed early work in which those shimmering colors and delicate nuances already appear that would later become so characteristic of his style. After the intermission, a roughly six-minute excerpt from the famous Chinese masterpiece »The Butterfly Lovers« in a version for piano trio opens the program – a short but striking glimpse into the world of Chinese folk melody and legendary poetry.

The main focus of the second part is Antonín Dvořák’s Fourth Piano Trio »Dumky«, whose shifts between contemplative melancholy and passionately dance-like exuberance reveal the ensemble’s full expressive range. In the atmospheric setting of the Recital Hall of the Elbphilharmonie, Eastern sound miniatures and major European chamber music works encounter one another not as opposites but as different modes of storytelling in the same language – the language of music.