Coffee Concert: Joanna MacGregor & BPO Principals

Joanna MacGregor enjoys a dazzling career as a pianist and has been an incredible force as Music Director of the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra with her bold programming. She and three celebrated BPO principal players present a rich, virtuoso concert of Shostakovich, Beethoven and Brahms.

Brahms’ majestic Horn Trio invented, at a stroke, a new art form at such a high level it’s been difficult to surpass. Brahms played the horn as a young man, and his lifelong affection for the instrument crowns the first symphony, as well as memorably opening his second piano concerto. Written in 1865 while staying in Baden-Baden’s Black Forest, the horn creates an atmosphere of romantic melancholy at the opening; this and the deeply moving Adagio mesto commemorates the death of Brahms’ mother Christiane, earlier in the year, evolving into the famously exhilarating scherzo and hunting theme of the finale.

Beethoven was determined to impress – and challenge – the Viennese elite with his marvellous, first-published Op. 1 Piano Trios. The 1795 C minor trio is his earliest masterpiece, full of stormy episodes and dramatic rhetoric: the heroic, muscular narratives of his ‘middle’ period are already in view. Shostakovich’s first piano trio is also the work of a very young man. The music is magically romantic in spirit, evoking Scriabin, Glazunov and Rachmaninoff – still with the Shostakovian hallmarks of acerbic wit, sudden changes of tempo and dramatic climaxes. Performed over one brief movement, it was originally titled Poème and dedicated to Tatyana Glivenko, with whom he fell in love while convalescing.