Fidelio Trio

French Impressions

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Darragh Morgan violin, Tim Gill cello, Mary Dullea piano

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Gabriel Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor op120

Erik Satie: Le Piège de Méduse; Je te veux; Prière pour le salut de mon âme

Claude Debussy: La Mer, arranged for Piano Trio by Sally Beamish

Oscar Bettison: Festival Commission

 

Programme Notes (also available free at concert)

The opus 120 Piano Trio is one of Fauré’s finest works, written and first performed in 1923, the year before he died; as might be expected, its overall mood is autumnal. It opens (and continues) with flowing melody, widening out into periods of quiet reflection. The work’s heart is the second movement Andantino – a profoundly moving yearning towards an eventually found resolution.

Le Piège de Méduse was a 1913 surrealistic one-act play for which Satie wrote both text and music. The music consists of seven very short dance pieces originally written for solo piano. They’re delightful and typical of the composer’s seemingly straightforward manner which simultaneously tries (mostly unsuccessfully) to restrain its laughter. Je te veux was first published as a sung waltz with erotic lyrics in 1903 and is redolent of fin de siècle music hall, while Prière pour le salut de mon âme comes from Messe des Pauvres, Satie’s only liturgical work.

Debussy composed La Mer early in the 20th century. When Sally Beamish prepared her version over a hundred years later in 2013 she said it was one of the biggest challenges she’d ever faced. But her complete reinvention of the original orchestral score for piano trio is a triumph. It’s hard to understand how three instruments alone can somehow evoke the sea’s atmospheric and turbulent currents with the same immediacy and excitement as a full-scale symphony orchestra – but rest assured, they can and do.

The Festival is very pleased to have been able to commission a short work for Fidelio from the British/American composer Oscar Bettison, currently Professor of Composition at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute. Based on a folksong of the same name, his breakthrough work, the evening-length O Death for mixed ensemble, grafts popular musical styles, including blues, onto the requiem structure. Composing more for orchestra in recent years, Remaking a Forest for Oregon Symphony premiered in 2019, Pale Icons of Night—his first violin concerto— debuted in 2018, and Lights in Ashes (an orchestral reimagination of a movement from O Death) was premiered by the New World Symphony in 2017. Bettison’s first opera, The Light of Lesser Days, premiered in September 2021 in the Netherlands.