Neave Trio Releases its Second Album of the Year

Cover of the new album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Readers may recall that the Neave Trio released its A Room of Her Own album this past February. Since that time, violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov, and pianist Eri Nakamura have clearly kept themselves productively busy, because this Friday will see the release of their second album of the year. The title of this new album is Rooted; and, as many probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. Once again, the album has a theme, this time examining the personal lives and cultural roots (hence the title) of four distinctively different composers, all with foundations in the late nineteenth century. In “order of appearance,” those composers and their associated works are as follows:

1. Bedřich Smetana: the Opus 15 piano trio, composed in 1855 and revised in 1857
2. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: the first five selections in the 1905 Opus 59 collection, Twenty-Four Negro Melodies
3. Josef Suk: the Opus 2 “Petit Trio,” composed in 1889 with a final revision in 1891
4. Frank Martin: the three-movement “Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises,” composed in 1925

The selections on this album are as diverse as the nationalities of the composers. As usual, none of the composers are unfamiliar to me. Nevertheless, as was the case with A Room of Her Own, I can say with some confidence that I never encountered any of them on a daily basis. Indeed, with the exception of their Musical Remembrances album, it would be fair to say that Neave Trio has cultivated a reputation for seeking out rarely-performed works and giving them “a place in the spotlight.” (Sarah Cahill had a similar mission with her Future is Female recordings, but Neave has less of a “gender bias!”)

During my student days, one of my favorite essays was “With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert” by Henry Miller. (This is one of the chapters in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.) Here is my favorite paragraph:

No one asks you to throw Mozart out the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Laotse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

None of the four composers on this album can be classified as “the coming ones.” Nevertheless, they remind us that there is still music from the nineteenth century that continues to scratch on the window-panes! Neave’s approach to repertoire reveals a generously imaginative approach to bringing awareness to that scratching.