Piano Trio

The piano trio -- piano, violin, cello -- occupies a unique niche in the music marketplace. A very popular genre in the classical and romantic eras, it almost petered out in the 20th century; there are no examples from Elgar, Prokofiev, Bartok, Stravinsky, Britten or Hindemith. This transparent, demanding format was seen, for many generations, primarily as a diversion for famous soloists such as Cortot/Thibaud/Casals, Rubinstein/Heifetz/Feuermann or, more recently, Bronfman/Shaham/Mork.

Glowing reports hold true. The Trio Con Brio Copenhagen clearly occupies a lofty perch in today's musical scene. On Tuesday, the ensemble (violinist Soo-Jin Hong, cellist Mathias Beyer-Karlshoj and pianist Jens Elvekjaer) helped skyrocket the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival toward its Sunday finish line with a concert of exquisitely wrought music at the center's Terrace Theater. Ravel's ravishing Piano Trio followed a pair of evocative, fantasy-propelled works by Denmark's Bent Sorensen and Per Norgard.

Glowing reports hold true. The Trio Con Brio Copenhagen clearly occupies a lofty perch in today's musical scene. On Tuesday, the ensemble (violinist Soo-Jin Hong, cellist Mathias Beyer-Karlshoj and pianist Jens Elvekjaer) helped skyrocket the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival toward its Sunday finish line with a concert of exquisitely wrought music at the center's Terrace Theater. Ravel's ravishing Piano Trio followed a pair of evocative, fantasy-propelled works by Denmark's Bent Sorensen and Per Norgard.

Saturday's sold-out matinee at the Atlas Intersections Festival featured a classical piano trio, an a cappella ensemble and an indie pop band. The show was called "Voice(s)," and it was, ostensibly, not a local music variety show but a dance performance. "This is our biggest collaboration yet," Tiffany Haughn, artistic director of DancEthos, told the full house in the Lang Theatre. There were 42 performers in total, and the collaborations, it must be said, were more impressive than the choreography.

The Jan. 27 birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart might not be a national holiday (yet!), but it's a great excuse to see a live performance of works by the Austrian composer, who was born in 1756. Celebrating the occasion is the Arlington-based National Chamber Ensemble, performing the Piano Trio in C, Duo for Violin and Viola, and the Piano Quartet in G Minor. The group will be joined by special guest Andrew Lu, a 10-year-old violinist and pianist. Jay Fisette, chairman of the Arlington County Board, will be on hand as the...

Saturday's sold-out matinee at the Atlas Intersections Festival featured a classical piano trio, an a cappella ensemble and an indie pop band. The show was called "Voice(s)," and it was, ostensibly, not a local music variety show but a dance performance. "This is our biggest collaboration yet," Tiffany Haughn, artistic director of DancEthos, told the full house in the Lang Theatre. There were 42 performers in total, and the collaborations, it must be said, were more impressive than the choreography.

While Schoenberg and his like-minded musical thinkers were deconstructing tonality in the 1920s and '30s, other composers (Kodaly and Bartok, to name just two) were rediscovering and reveling in the folk music of their respective homelands — and Bartok had feet in both worlds. On Thursday — under the sponsorship of Charles Krauthammer's organization, the Pro Musica Hebraica — pianist Jascha Nemtsov, joined by cellist Julian Arp, violinist Frank Reinecke and clarinetist Alexander...

Sequestration, furloughs and other horrors: Washington's specific fears and the nation's general unease took shape in a dance by Mark Morris called "The ­Office. " Of course, that's just one way to look at the piece, performed this weekend by the Mark Morris Dance Group at George Mason University Center for the Arts. Its power was in its ambiguity. Dressed in small-town ordinariness, its dancers circled and snaked through spare, open folk-dance steps, answering the bittersweet but irresistible call of...

It's an age-old question: Why spend an evening listening to Schubert string quartets when you could be at a bar, screaming at the television? But for the thin crowd who skipped the Super Bowl on Sunday night and made it down to the Hugo Wolf Quartet's recital at the National Gallery of Art, the rewards were every bit as dramatic as the Giants' win. This relatively young, Vienna-based quartet has been generating a lot of buzz lately for its intensely...

Sunday afternoon's "Mendelssohn on the Mall" concert at the National Academy of Sciences may not have had the same cachet as that other bigger and louder Sunday Mall event scheduled at roughly the same time, but the several hundred members of its audience got the chance to walk the same exhilarating walk to get there with the many thousands who were headed a block farther south. This was another celebration -- of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth. A number of Mall institutions are sponsoring concerts of his music this...

Sequestration, furloughs and other horrors: Washington's specific fears and the nation's general unease took shape in a dance by Mark Morris called "The ­Office. " Of course, that's just one way to look at the piece, performed this weekend by the Mark Morris Dance Group at George Mason University Center for the Arts. Its power was in its ambiguity. Dressed in small-town ordinariness, its dancers circled and snaked through spare, open folk-dance steps, answering the bittersweet but irresistible call of Dvorak's Bagatelles...

They were squeezing chairs into every last inch of the Music Room at the Phillips Collection on Sunday, and little wonder: Three of Russia's most spectacular young soloists had teamed up for an afternoon of mostly-Russian music, and it promised to be an extraordinary afternoon, steeped in the kind of magnificent tragedy that Russians do best. And, in fact, it was: From the first hushed notes of Rachmaninoff's "Trio élégiaque," No. 1, to the almost ecstatic despair of Tchaikovsky's Trio in A Minor,...

The Morgenstern Trio gave a smashing debut Thursday evening at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Formed in 2005 at an obscure (to us) music school in Germany — the Folkwang Academy — and studying under mentors most of whose names ring no bells, the trio has nonetheless attained a world-class level. In works by Ravel, Bernstein and Brahms, the group displayed a unanimity, polished technique and musical imagination that I thought had vanished from the scene with the demise of...

Does it take a village to raise a cellist? Steven Honigberg — a highly regarded member of the National Symphony Orchestra's cello section — might well agree. In an intriguing and deeply personal recital Saturday at Georgetown's Dumbarton Church, Honigberg presented an evening of music that reflected the varied influences other cellists have had on his path, from mentors Maurice Gendron and Mstislav Rostropovich to performer-composers such as Marin Marais and Gaspar Cassado. The result was an unabashedly...

Pairing works by Bach and Mendelssohn on a chamber music program makes a lot of sense. Mendelssohn, after all, adored Bach's music and championed his works when they were out of fashion. But the pieces the Kennedy Center Chamber Players programmed at their Terrace Theater recital Sunday couldn't have shown the stylistic contrast between the composers more dramatically. Bach's lithe and serenely beautiful Violin Sonata No. 1 in B Minor benefited from violinist (and National Symphony Orchestra...

While Schoenberg and his like-minded musical thinkers were deconstructing tonality in the 1920s and '30s, other composers (Kodaly and Bartok, to name just two) were rediscovering and reveling in the folk music of their respective homelands — and Bartok had feet in both worlds. On Thursday — under the sponsorship of Charles Krauthammer's organization, the Pro Musica Hebraica — pianist Jascha Nemtsov, joined by cellist Julian Arp, violinist Frank Reinecke and clarinetist Alexander...

Pairing works by Bach and Mendelssohn on a chamber music program makes a lot of sense. Mendelssohn, after all, adored Bach's music and championed his works when they were out of fashion. But the pieces the Kennedy Center Chamber Players programmed at their Terrace Theater recital Sunday couldn't have shown the stylistic contrast between the composers more dramatically. Bach's lithe and serenely beautiful Violin Sonata No. 1 in B Minor benefited from violinist (and National Symphony Orchestra concertmaster)

Does it take a village to raise a cellist? Steven Honigberg — a highly regarded member of the National Symphony Orchestra's cello section — might well agree. In an intriguing and deeply personal recital Saturday at Georgetown's Dumbarton Church, Honigberg presented an evening of music that reflected the varied influences other cellists have had on his path, from mentors Maurice Gendron and Mstislav Rostropovich to performer-composers such as Marin Marais and Gaspar Cassado. The result was an unabashedly...

The Jan. 27 birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart might not be a national holiday (yet!), but it's a great excuse to see a live performance of works by the Austrian composer, who was born in 1756. Celebrating the occasion is the Arlington-based National Chamber Ensemble, performing the Piano Trio in C, Duo for Violin and Viola, and the Piano Quartet in G Minor. The group will be joined by special guest Andrew Lu, a 10-year-old violinist and pianist. Jay Fisette, chairman of the Arlington County Board, will be on hand as the...

Sunday afternoon's "Mendelssohn on the Mall" concert at the National Academy of Sciences may not have had the same cachet as that other bigger and louder Sunday Mall event scheduled at roughly the same time, but the several hundred members of its audience got the chance to walk the same exhilarating walk to get there with the many thousands who were headed a block farther south. This was another celebration -- of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth. A number of Mall institutions are sponsoring concerts of his music this...