MUSIC: The threes have it

The Eroica Trio — Sara Parkins, violin; Sara Sant'Ambrogio, cello; and Erika Nickrenz, piano — performs at 7:30 p.m. today at the Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave., Little Rock.

Eroica is very likely the busiest and best-known classical piano trios, and the concert is a physical and financial collaboration between the Chamber Music Society of Little Rock, whose 2019-20 season it kicks off, and the Acansa Arts Festival of the South, of which the concert is one of many parts.

The trio will play arrangements of the "Chaconne" from the solo-violin Partita No. 2 in d minor by J.S. Bach and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Vocalise; Porgy and Bess Fantasy, music of George Gershwin arranged for the trio by Kenji Bunch; and the Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, op.8, by Johannes Brahms.

"It's a fun program," says Sant'Ambrogio, and the Gershwin and Brahms pieces "actually work so wonderfully well together, because both [composers] have such an extraordinary ability to compose such shockingly beautiful melodies that go right to the heart."

Sant'Ambrogio cites a common feeling of longing that suffuses many works of Brahms and the feeling Porgy expresses in the Gershwin opera: "'Bess, You Is My Woman Now' — I realize that I'm playing it, not as a decoration, but almost like, 'I can't believe you're my woman because I've always had rejection.' There's just this hesitancy and longing to be able to declare it and it's almost that he can't."

The "Chaconne" arrangement, she says, "is one of the best openers that you can possibly start a program with. [Arranger] Ann Dudley gave the cello the opening chord progression. It's so shocking — everybody's hair just blows straight back. So dramatic; it shows the power of the architecture of Bach's music, that you can take a piece that he wrote for a solo, four-string instrument, and it sounds phenomenal in a piano trio."

The trio apparently hasn't previously performed in central Arkansas, but it most recently gave concerts in Eureka Springs in 2012 and 2015; Sant'Ambrogio and Parkins performed as part of the Eureka Springs Into Music Festival in spring 2016.

And Sant'Ambrogio played a Eureka Springs recital with pianist Robert Koenig in the summer of 2014, raising money toward what Sant'Ambrogio envisioned as an annual chamber music festival in the Northwest Arkansas town that she said in 2014 she'd fallen in love with. But the project eventually fell through. "I needed a business person on the ground, and I didn't have one," she now says simply.

After leaving Little Rock, the trio heads to the Washington area to play Ludwig van Beethoven's Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano (the so-called "Triple Concerto") with the National Philharmonic and conductor Piotr Gajewski. The "Eroica and Beethoven" concert, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the Music Center at Strathmore in suburban Maryland, honors Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020.

How many times they'll play the concerto in a given season varies, Sant'Ambrogio says, "depending on if we're doing any of these big long tours that we often do in Europe and the [United] States," but some seasons they could perform it as many as 60 times.

"We've now played this more than any trio in the history [of the piece]," she says. "Thank God it's Beethoven, because you could get a little tired of some composers. But his architecture and orchestration is so unbelievable that I never get tired of it. Every single time I hear something different in the orchestra, and the conductor and orchestra are bringing something new to it."

And after intermission, Gajewski will lead the orchestra in Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, nicknamed "Eroica."

"I can't tell you how many times they've paired that with us," Sant'Ambrogio says with an audible smile.

Weekend on 09/19/2019