Trillium piano trio plans Sept. 23 performance celebrating young prodigies and venerated masters
Sept. 12, 2023
Methodical planning leads to rapturous execution — it’s a lesson Dr. Robert Bonham, Maryville College professor emeritus, learned years ago, and it’s the reason concert preparations by his ensemble, the piano trio Trillium, are given such forethought.
Bonham, whose career as a Maryville College professor spanned more than four decades, puts together Trillium programs — like the one taking place Sept. 23 at the Clayton Center for the Arts on the MC campus — months ahead of time, each piece selected after careful consideration of a particular theme.
For the fall Trillium performance, Bonham has been ruminating on both wunderkind compositions and late-in-life masterpieces.
“For Debussy’s ‘Piano Trio,’ he wrote it when he was 17, and each time I work with it, I’m in awe and so impressed that a kid wrote that,” Bonham said. “You can hear things in it that would later become trademarks of his. And then we’ll do a Fauré trio, which he wrote when he was 77 years old, a year before he died, and you can hear the lifetime of work he put into it.”
Claude Debussy’s 1880 “Piano Trio” and Gabriel Fauré’s “Piano Trio, Op. 120” will comprise the first half of the Sept. 23 program, and the second half will be the revised version of Johannes Brahms’ “Piano Trio, Op. 8,” originally written in 1854, when Brahms was 20.
“He wrote it as he was becoming friends with Robert and Clara Schumann, and during that time, Robert wrote in a publication read throughout Europe that Brahms was basically the next great musician and compared him to Beethoven,” Bonham said. “Soon after that, Robert had several episodes of mental challenges, and in the process of all of this, Brahms was writing this trio, and it all came about from Robert’s prophecy, Brahms’ friendship with the Schumanns, Robert’s emotional breakdown and processing it all when he didn’t even know who he was yet.”
In 1891, a publisher inquired about Brahms’ interest in revising the piece,” which he did. The result is a “significantly improved” piece that’s shorter and more concise, made all the more emotionally impactful by the full circle return to it decades later. Themed performances by Trillium, Bonham added, are a recent addition to the ensemble’s repertoire and reflect the direction provided by violinist Sara Lee-Cho, who replaced Alison Maerker Garner after the performance pause enforced by COVID-19.
“Alison decided she needed to do something different, although we still play some together,” Bonham said. “Sara replaced her and has a lot of background in chamber music. Her ideas for the repertoire have been a breath of fresh air.”
Lee-Cho and Bonham will be joined by cellist Alicia Randisi-Hooker, a longtime member of Trillium who holds a master’s of music degree in cello performance from Temple University in Philadelphia and a bachelor’s of music in performance from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She has performed extensively as an orchestral and chamber musician in both the United States and Europe, and in addition to her work with Trillium, she has served as a member of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, the Oak Ridge Symphony, the Shreveport Symphony and the Philly Pops.
Lee-Cho has performed professionally with chamber and symphony orchestras in three countries, including the Vancouver, Charleston and Birmingham symphonies, the UNISINOS Chamber Orchestra in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, and the ARCO Chamber Orchestra, with whom she performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall. Bonham, the trio’s pianist, is a recipient of the Maryville College Outstanding Teacher Award and retired from Maryville College in 2006. In retirement, he presents a variety of workshops nationally to enhance wellness and performance and enjoys leading groups to explore India or sail the Greek seas.
Trillium, now in its ninth year, has played for enthusiastic audiences from Maryland to North Dakota, Virginia, and North Carolina, in addition to numerous performances in Blount, Knox and Anderson counties.
The Sept. 23 Trillium performance takes place at 7:30 p.m. in the Harold and Jean Lambert Recital Hall of the Clayton Center for the Arts. Admission is free, and the concert is open to the public. For more information, contact the Clayton Center at 865-981-8590.