Familiar Faces Return to Davies as Trio

Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet (from the SFS Web page for last night’s performance)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall hosted a trio of musicians, all of whom had previously performed as solo artists with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The earliest, and probably most familiar, of these was pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who made his debut with SFS in October of 1994. The other two made their first appearances with SFS in the current century. Cellist Gautier Capuçon made his SFS debut as a Shenson Young Artist in 2009, and violinist Lisa Batiashvili made her debut in 2024, an appearance that included a tour with the ensemble in Southern California.

The earliest work on the program was the G major piano trio that Claude Debussy composed in 1880. It is also one of Debussy’s earliest compositions, given the number L. 5 in the catalog compiled by François Lesure. Indeed, those unfamiliar with the music would probably be surprised to learn that it was by Debussy! Personally, I have been familiar with the work for some time, probably going back to when I wrote about the Warner Classic “complete works” release of the Debussy catalog. Thanks to chronology, the trio is the first selection of the first CD in the chamber music category! As a result, last night’s encounter with this trio was a trip down memory lane; and I am delighted that I loved every minute of it!

Just as refreshing was my encounter with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 65 trio in F minor. According to my archives, I have not had an opportunity to write about listening to this composition since my Examiner.com days, when I wrote about a performance of the work by the Delphi Trio in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church in September of 2012. This was composed about three years after the Debussy trio, and it was the third of the composer’s four piano trios. Each of these two trios was situated on either side of the intermission, making for an engaging compare-and-contrast experience.

The program began in the twentieth century with one of Dmitri Shostakovich’s earliest compositions. Ironically, my last encounter also involved the music introducing a program. The work itself was Shostakovich’s Opus 8, his first piano trio composed in the key of C minor; and it had previously been selected to open the San Francisco Performances Gift Concert for the 2023–24 season! As I had written at that time, the music was “so unfamiliar that a performing edition was not prepared until six years after the composer’s death.” In that context, I should be thankful that I had to wait only about two years for another encounter! That said, I felt that, last night, this music provided just the right way to get the audience to sit up and take notice!

Unless I am mistaken, this is the first time I have encountered a performance with the encore printed in the program! That selection was the piano trio arrangement of Manu Martin’s large-scale symphonic composition “LIM Symphony of Oceans.” The music was originally composed for Singaporean surgeon Dr. Susan Lim and Christina Teenz Tan as part of their project to explore the intersection of humanity, artificial intelligence, and nature through large-scale orchestral music. As a “veteran” of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was not difficult for me to dismiss these intentions as little more than balderdash; and, as far as the music was concerned, I could only think back on that “too many notes” trope in the script for Amadeus!