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BEAUX ARTS TRIO PLAYS KURTAG AT FAREWELL CONCERT
After performing for fifty years all over the world, the famed piano trio, the Beaux Arts Trio, has decided to leave the concert stage. The ensemble is on a farewell tour of the United States. They played their last concert in Washington in April, in the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Auditorium, the same concert hall they played their first concert in Washington, in January 1958. The group’s founding pianist is Menahem Pressler, uncannily youthful at age 84. He performed in Budapest last year.
During their Washington farewell performance, the ensemble played Ravel, Schubert and Gyorgy Kurtag. The Kurtag piece was written for the Beaux Arts Trio in 2005. The reviewer in the Washington Post writes, “They wisely chose to play the brief Kurtag piece twice, which astonishingly altered initial perceptions of its spare textures and contained gestures.”
The music critic ends his review with the following: “This was an evening of chamber music such as one hopes to encounter, at best, two or three times in a lifetime. We are going to miss them.”
Zoltan Bagdy
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