Merz Trio Launches Noe Music’s 30th Anniversary

Yesterday afternoon at the Noe Valley Ministry, Noe Music (formerly known as Noe Valley Chamber Music) launched its 30th Anniversary Season. Perhaps in an ongoing spirit of moving forward, yesterday’s offering presented the San Francisco debut of the Boston-based Merz Trio. The members of this piano trio are pianist Lee Dionne, violinist Brigid Coleridge, and cellist Julia Yang. The title of the program was Ink Spills; and, in his notes for the program, Dionne explained that the performance consisted of a concert adaptation of the trio’s debut album INK.

The album was conceived as an exploration of Maurice Ravel’s piano trio. Dionne’s notes explained that “we wanted to know the voices that were in the air and on the streets when Ravel was writing” his trio. This included the works of composers from that time, including both Boulanger sisters, Nadia and Lili, and the popular music composer Vincent Scotto. In addition, the contemporary composer Lee Dionne contributed a reflection on the opening theme of Ravel’s trio. Without the confines of the album, the trio could expand the scope of this repertoire with the Opus 120 piano trio by Ravel’s contemporary, Gabriel Fauré and their own arrangement of much earlier keyboard compositions by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Interleaved among these selections were recitations of texts, whose authors were also Ravel’s contemporaries.

While this abundance of resources might strike some as overkill, the program itself, complete with the recitations, proceeded at an engagingly fast clip. Where necessary, the trio prepared arrangements of music composed for other resources, not only from Rameau but also from the popular selection (best known for having been sung by Josephine Baker). Most interesting, however, was Dionne’s “zortziko-fandango,” which discloses a Basque folk dance as an inspiration for the opening measures of Ravel’s trio.

The Fauré trio fit comfortably into the flow of selections from the INK album, preceding the mid-way intermission in the program. The interleaving of the Ravel movements with the “context-setting” selections of both spoken text and music proceeded smoothly. Indeed, following the trio’s Finale movement, the enthusiastic response definitely justified a return for an encore. This, again, involved an arrangement by the members of the trio, giving a nod to the contemporary of Ravel that had been neglected during the program itself. The performance concluded with one of Claude Debussy’s piano compositions, “La Plus que Lente” (as slow as possible), allowing the audience to leave the hall with wistful thoughts of what they had experienced.