The Van Baerle Trio to perform in Lewes

The trio take their name from the street where it all started: Van Baerle Street, Amsterdam. The three players met while studying at the Conservatorium, a stone’s throw from the famous Concertgebouw.

The concert on January 28 will be at 7.45pm in the Cliffe Building, East Sussex College, Mountfield Road, Lewes BN7 2XH. Tickets (£20, eight-25s free) are available online fromwww.ticketsource.co.uk/nyslewes and at the door on the night. The trio are Hannes Minnaar, piano; Maria Milstein, violin; and Gideon den Herder, cello, and their programme will be Haydn – Piano Trio in E flat major Hob XV; Theo Verbey (1959-2019) – Piano Trio; and Schubert – Piano Trio in E flat major D 929.

Maria said: “We all met at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 2004 and started playing together almost from the beginning. I was in my first year and Gideon and Hannes in their second year of bachelor studies. It was chance that brought us together. As students we had to form a chamber music ensemble, and we were introduced to each other by the head of the string department.

“When we started, we absolutely had no idea that our trio would develop so far.

“In fact we all three came from rather different musical backgrounds and needed some time to get to know each other better, both musically and on a personal level.

“We were all three ambitious students and put a lot of effort into our ensemble from the start and became eager to go further as a trio once our study time in Amsterdam was over. With the guidance of some exceptional musicians Menahem Pressler, Ferenc Rados and Christian Schuster among others, we were able to find our own voice and were successful in several competitions in the Netherlands and abroad, including the ARD competition in Munich. By now we are existing for almost 18 years and hope for many more years to come!

“The piano trio world is rather small, and we often know our colleagues personally or have at least heard them perform.

“There are several wonderful ensembles out there, which makes our little chamber music bubble very inspirational as much for us musicians as hopefully for our public.

“We come all three from different backgrounds. I was born in Russia and raised in a family of musicians, Gideon (our cellist) was born and raised in Amsterdam and had from an early stage had a lot of affinity with historic performance practice, and our pianist Hannes came from a small town in the south of the Netherlands and was the first in his family to go into classical music.

“Each of us has brought something very specific and personal into the trio, and we integrate these various facets in our playing and achieve unity through our differences.

“We are very excited to bring to the UK, next to well-known piano trios by Haydn and Schubert, the Piano Trio of the Dutch composer Theo Verbey, written in 1999 for our wonderful colleagues of the Osiris Trio.

“This trio is, despite the almost mathematical precision with which it is written, very accessible and creates within each movement a very specific soundscape – lyrical and somewhat impressionistic in the first movement, mysterious with some sudden explosions in the second movement, light and jazzy in the third movement and desolated and grim in the finale.”

“We start the programme with the witty and always unpredictable Trio in E flat Major XV:30 by Haydn, and return to E flat Major with arguably one of the greatest masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire - Schubert Trio no. 2 D 929.”

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