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Echoes Across Time: Music for Piano Trio
Echoes Across Time: Music for Piano Trio
Miki Aoki joins Luke Hill and Wesley Skinner in a different combination for each piece: violin and piano, then cello and piano, then all three. George Frideric Handel’s Violin Sonata opens the afternoon. It was his last piece of chamber music, and its closing dance returned as the sinfonia that opens the third act of Jephtha, the oratorio he set aside in February 1751 when the sight in his left eye began to fail.
Fazıl Say’s Four Cities takes the cello through four Turkish cities: the melancholy of a saz in Sivas, a fast Black Sea dance in Hopa, a wartime protest song in Ankara, and jazz in the bars of Bodrum, ending in a pub brawl. Our principal cellist Wesley Skinner calls it one of the greatest cello works written this century.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky once told his patron he could not endure the sound of piano with violin and cello. Then Nikolai Rubinstein died, and Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Trio in A minor in Rubinstein’s memory. Rubinstein had been one of the great pianists of the age, so the piano part grew until it came close to a concerto.
Mountain Artists Guild joins us for the third time, with a juried show responding to the music, on stage and in the lobby.
Admission
- Tier 1: $69.00
- Tier 2: $54.00
- Tier 3: $28.00
- 21 and under: $10.00
- K–12 teacher with ID: $15.00
Thursday February 11, free: cellist Wesley Skinner takes you inside this program.
Works on the program:
- George Frideric Handel: Violin Sonata in D Major
- Fazıl Say: Four Cities
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor
Equally celebrated as a soloist, chamber musician, and collaborative artist, Miki Aoki brings exceptional versatility and depth to her performances, which have captivated audiences across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano at Arizona State University.
Dr. Aoki made her debut at age 12 at the Royal Festival Hall in London as a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and has since performed at Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, and festivals including the Salzburger Festspiele and the Menuhin Festival Gstaad. She records exclusively for the German label Hänssler Profil; her four albums include Tokyo Story, a world premiere of music from the films of Yasujiro Ozu in their original piano manuscript versions. She earned degrees from Indiana University, Yale University, and Stony Brook University, and completed the Konzertexamen with distinction at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. Miki Aoki is a Steinway Artist.
Violinist Luke Hill is the concertmaster of the West Valley Symphony and assistant concertmaster of Arizona Philharmonic. A graduate of Arizona State University, where he studied with Dr. Katherine McLin, and the University of Colorado studying under Charles Wetherbee. Mr. Hill has performed internationally at festivals such as Brevard Music Festival and Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. He has also studied abroad in Florence, Italy, and Saarburg, Germany, and performs on a 1912 W.E. Hill & Sons violin.
Cellist Wesley Skinner is the principal cellist of Arizona Philharmonic with degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Arizona State University. Wesley explores innovative programming through cross-disciplinary collaboration with female and Latin American composers, as well as commissioning new works for the cello repertoire. He has won awards internationally as a soloist and chamber musician in addition to his music composition for theater here in Arizona. Wesley works with hundreds of cellists yearly between his private studio, summer teaching, and community outreach.
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