Piano & Co: Boundless Time

A special chamber concert featuring members of the TSOI, Walter Seebacher from the Conservatory, and Benjamin Kammerer from the Mozarteum University. Ludwig van Beethoven’s brilliant piece owes its nickname, the “Gassenhauer Trio,” to a melody by the then-popular opera composer Joseph Weigl, whose Italian opera *L’amor marinaro* (*The Corsair of Love*) was one of the greatest theatrical successes of the time. Maurice Ravel’s only piano trio was composed at the beginning of World War I in the French Basque Country, his mother’s beloved homeland. Despite the looming disaster, it is a sensitive work, full of poetry and Basque rhythms, that seems to conjure beauty on the brink of the abyss. Olivier Messiaen composed his singular Quatuor in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz during World War II, and it was premiered there by the inmates. The “end of time” is posited within it, yet overcome by deep faith and the mystery of birdsong. The inner radiance of the music ultimately proves stronger than the horror of the era, which expands into the boundless.