The San Francisco Early Music Society opens its 43rd concert season with the Costanoan Trio. Representing “the best of emerging early music talent” (Early Music America), the Costanoan Trio explores the piano trio repertoire of the late 18th and early 19th centuries on period instruments and attempts to recreate the world of domestic music-making in intimate concert spaces. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founding members Derek Tam (fortepiano), Cynthia Black (violin), and Frédéric Rosselet (cello) played together in various ensembles before deciding to become a trio. Their program features trios by the four great composer-pianists of the late 18th century—Haydn, Mozart, Clementi, and Beethoven.
From the program:
Written during the composer’s second sojourn to England between February 1794 and August 1795, the B-flat major trio was likely inspired pianistically by the robust fortepianos Haydn heard in London. . .
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In the summer of 1788, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had just moved into bigger and cheaper digs outside of Vienna where he had a garden. Shortly after, he wrote to his friend Michael von Puchberg asking for help amidst financial struggles and assuring him that with more space, both physically and mentally. . .
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Clementi became one of the most sought-after (and expensive) piano teachers in London. He was heavily involved in his piano manufacturing company as well. Throughout his career, he was in close professional contact with the likes of the era’s most remembered musicians: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. . .
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No one knows for sure whether young Ludwig van Beethoven ever met Mozart. In 1786, Beethoven took his first trip to Austria in order to study with him, but that dream was unfortunately postponed . . .
The Costanoan Trio takes its name from the Spanish word for the San Francisco Bay Area natives, coined in the second half of the 1700s when Western culture was being brought to the “new coast” while early classical music was being composed on another continent.