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Trio Klein was formed by three award-winning and critically acclaimed musicians. Achieving astounding early success, they gave their London debut at St. James’s Piccadilly in 2018 and have performed extensively in the UK, including St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Bath Recitals, Chobham Music Festival and re-invitations to tour for Concerts in the West. Their first international tour throughout Italy was featured on RAI TV.
Violinist Kamila Bydlowska, violist Shiry Rashkovsky and cellist Ella Rundle bring with them a wealth of musical and artistic experience, including numerous international festival engagements such as Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music, disc recordings for NMC and Toccata Classics, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, RAI and New York’s WQXR. In July 2021, they gave a live performance on BBC Radio 3’s ‘In Tune’.
As an ensemble, Trio Klein present highly varied and innovative programmes featuring masterpieces from the canon alongside rarely-heard gems and cutting edge new repertoire.
To find out more about the artists see www.trioklein.com.
Photo credit: Alice Lubbock
PASSION AND POISE FROM THE TRIO KLEIN
Concert goers at Skipton Music enjoyed a rare treat with a superb programme from the Trio Klein. Professional string trios (violin, viola, cello) are few and far between and this was a great opportunity to sample some of the highlights from this neglected repertoire.
The first half was framed by two pieces of passionate intensity, the incomplete (one-movement) trio by Jean Sibelius and the two-movement trio by the modern Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki. These fine pieces enabled the trio to demonstrate the extraordinary, rich sonority which playing of this quality can generate. Your reviewer was particularly struck by the second movement of the Penderecki, a toccata of relentless energy and drive. In between, the variations on a Bavarian folk song by the 18-year old Richard Strauss provided some welcome light relief, performed by the trio with a fine sense of whimsical humour.
The second half began in totally different mood in the elegance and poise of a selection of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Even Bach purists would have admired the way in which, even with modern instruments, the trio were able to reproduce the finesse and expressiveness of baroque string technique. The opening and closing “Aria” movements were particularly haunting.
The ensemble ended with the trio by the composer from whom they take their name, the prodigiously talented Czech/Jewish composer Gideon Klein. His string trio is a marvellous piece, with its brooding central movement, based on a Moravian folk song, framed by urgently driven outer movements. The trio responded to its demands with a performance of total passion and conviction – it would be hard to imagine better advocates for this powerful work. What a tragedy that Klein died in the Nazi concentration camps only a few weeks before their liberation by the Allies; what wonderful music might he otherwise have written for us to enjoy!
Charles Dobson