Horowitz Center Playbills and Programs
Piano Forte, String Smart
Saturday, March 7, 2026
7:30 p.m.
Monteabaro Recital Hall
FEATURING
Trio ToUché & Gemini Piano Trio
Christopher Dillon, Piano | Eva Mengelkoch, Piano
Hsiu-Hui Wang, Piano | Sheng-Tsung Wang, Violin
Benjamin Myers, Cello
PROGRAM
| Piece | Composer |
|---|---|
| Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt BWV 637 | Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) György Kurtág (Arr.) (1926) |
| Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 | Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Renaud de Vilbac (Arr.) (1829-1884) |
| Scherzo | |
| Romance Waltz |
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) |
| Trio ToUché |
|
| Le Tombeau de Couperin | Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Matthew van Brink (Arr.) (b. 1978) |
| I. Prelude II. Forlane III. Menuet IV. Riagaudon |
|
| Gemini Piano Trio | |
| INTERMISSION | |
| Canone Infinito | Thomas Schwan (b. 1985) |
| Carmen Suite No. 1 | Georges Bizet (1838-1875) Jakub Kowalewski (Arr.) (b. 1977) |
| I. Prélude II. Aragonaise III. Intermezzo IV. Les toréadors |
|
| Trio ToUché | |
| Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 | Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) Hsiu-Hui Wang/Benjamin Meyers (Arr.) |
| I. Aria (Cantilena) II. Dança (Martelo) |
|
| Trio ToUché & Gemini Piano Trio | |
ARTIST BIOS
Founded in 2022, Trio ToUché features Towson University piano faculty Eva Mengelkoch, Hsiu-Hui Wang, and Christopher Dillon in performances of repertory for six hands at one piano. Trio ToUché appears on recital series in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area, at house concerts, and at Towson University, where they serve as an ensemble in residence. Trio ToUché’s recent and upcoming performances include recitals in Baltimore City, Arnold, Westminster, Washington, Towson University, and concerts for outreach programs, such as Music in the Atrium at the NIH (National Institutes for Health).
The San Diego Union-Tribune hailed them as “mind readers, anticipating each other’s every move” while applauding their “almost uncanny musical closeness.” The New York Concert Review by late Edith Eisler referred to the trio as “a model of classical elegance and restraint.” The Gemini Piano Trio was also praised for their “amazing virtuosity” by Music Monthly, as well as for their Taipei debut performance that “epitomized the idiom of chamber music” by The Taipei times. The American Record Guide praised their début Ives/Brahms CD saying, “There is an admirable balance between confidence, polished technique, and impulsive, romantic ardor in this performance.” Their second album, featuring trios by Ravel and Shostakovich, released in 2003, also received rave reviews. The trio has also taken top prizes in many of the great chamber music competitions, as the the prestigious Chamber Music Yellow Springs National Competition, Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Chamber Music Competition, and the 1997 Baltimore Chamber Music Awards competition. At La Jolla Chamber Music Society's SummerFest, the trio worked with the great artists of our time such as Raymond Hanson, Cecile Licad, Cho-Liang Lin, Joseph Kalichstein, David Finckel, Wu Han, Ida Kavafian, Gilbert Kalish, and Menahem Pressler.
The trio was featured on National Public Radio, and has concertized extensively throughout the United States and performed guest engagements at universities such as Princeton, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, and Soochow University in Taiwan. In addition to a standing room-only debut concert at the Taipei National Recital Hall in 2008, the Gemini Piano Trio made their debut in 2010 at Carnegie Hall, also to a sold-out house. In addition to recording for Ulrich and Arabesque Records, the trio recently celebrated their 30th Anniversary in the 2024-2025 season as one of the few professional all-family chamber groups.
PROGRAM NOTES
György Kurtág (b. 1926) is a Hungarian composer and pianist, widely regarded as one of the most significant living figures in contemporary classical music. His transcription of J. S. Bach’s chorale prelude Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt (BWV 637) for piano trio is part of a series of intimate piano arrangements—primarily for four hands or two pianos—of masterpieces ranging from Machaut to Bach. These works often display intricate voice-leading and a characteristically concentrated, modern sensibility. Kurtág, who celebrated his 100th birthday last month, originally prepared these transcriptions for performance with his wife.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 Op.36 was composed in 1801-1802, a period of increasing depression and anxiety for the composer. His deafness, which he had previously kept secret, became acute enough that he expressed his anxiety in letters. In November of 1801, he writes to his friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler, “my poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I avoided—all human society.” In the same letter he makes what will become one of the most famous proclamations by any artist in history: “I will seize Fate by the throat . . . .” Dear Beethoven, how many generations of struggling humans have been inspired by your Promethean fist-shaking!
The Second Symphony is the first in Beethoven’s output to feature a Scherzo movement; the First Symphony contains a Menuetto (though hardly a traditional one!) in the same position. Although both genres are in ¾ time, the Scherzo is so fast that it is performed in one beat to the bar rather than three. The middle section, or trio, is so called because it is thinner in texture than the rest and normally provides some relief from the more boisterous outer sections. In this case, it contains some of Beethoven’s most abrupt modulations and violent sforzandi, foreshadowing the grotesquerie and dogged playfulness of the symphony’s finale. The present arrangement for piano trio by Renaud de Vilbac smooths many of the rough edges. Through a rare bit of arranging alchemy, a great deal of Beethoven’s orchestration still shines through.
Written in 1890-91, Rachmaninoff dedicated the Two Pieces for Six Hands to the three friends for whom the work was written, the sisters Skalon: Natalya, Lyudmila and Vera. One of only two works on this program originally composed for three performers on a single piano, it was completed when he was just 18 years of age.
The Waltz exhibits the layers of melody and chromatic froth that would later characterize much of his work for piano. It harbors no delusions of grandeur; rather, it appears at first to be typical bit of fin de siècle salon-music. Yet it is one of the finest essays in the genre, charming, bubbly music that evokes fine champagne.
The opening bars of the Romance will be almost too familiar to concert goers, as the passage would later re-appear in the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s now-ubiquitous Second Piano Concerto in C minor. After the introduction, a long-breathed melody in song (ABA) form appears, a melody (like many of the composer’s best) which seems engaged in a contest to see to what heights it can rise without taking a breath. The coda subsides into near-silence, bringing the set to a quiet close.
Maurice Ravel - Le Tombeau de Couperin, Arranged by Matthew van Brink.
Maurice Ravel began Le tombeau de Couperin in 1914 and completed the piano suite in 1917, during the years of the First World War. In 1919 he orchestrated four of its six movements; this version was first performed in Paris on February 28, 1920. Conceived with luminous clarity, the work reflects Ravel’s gift for transparency, elegance, and refined color.
Though initially deemed too slight for military service, Ravel enlisted as a nurse’s aide and later served as a truck driver for the French army. The war years brought hardship, illness, and the devastating loss of his mother. What began as a tribute to the grace of eighteenth-century French music became something more personal: each movement is dedicated to a friend who died in the war. Rather than portraying battle, the suite offers a poised and tender act of remembrance.
Modeled on the Baroque dance suite, the work evokes the spirit of François Couperin through stylized dances—Prélude, Forlane, Menuet, and Rigaudon in the orchestral version—blending neoclassical clarity with modern harmonic wit. In the present arrangement for piano trio by Matthew van Brink, melodic lines and instrumental colors are imaginatively rebalanced, drawing inspiration from both Ravel’s original piano score and his later orchestration while bringing fresh intimacy to this graceful memorial.
Thomas Schwan (b. 1985) is an Italian-German-American pianist, composer, and educator. His Canone Infinito (2017), written for piano trio (six hands at one piano), is constructed around the orbital, cross-shaped configuration of the notes A–B–D–C and their three permutations, which likewise form a cross. At once a rigorous study rooted in the Western contrapuntal tradition and a poetic, symbolic meditation on infinity, the work unfolds through the perpetual motion of its four-note theme. Like a distant, bell-like resonance echoing across registers and spaces, it seeks to reconcile opposites: silence and sound, fullness and emptiness, motion and stasis, being and becoming.
Georges Bizet’s popular opera Carmen was Premiered in Paris in 1875. Carmen, the main character of the story, was a free-spirited Gypsy seductress whose betrayal of her lover led to her eventual demise and brought the plot to a tragic end. It became common practice in the nineteenth century for composers to produce orchestral suites from their operas. It helped with the promotion of the opera, as well as reaching out to audiences who may not have the means to be able to see the opera in full. Bizet sadly died during the 31st performance of Carmen in France, so he tragically never saw the international success it gained around the world, nor did he have the chance to produce the orchestral suites for it. It was not until 10 years after Bizet’s death that his close friend, Ernest Guirard, produced the first suite in 1882.
The opening prelude of the Carmen Suite No.1 introduces the ominous theme associated with both Carmen and her fate at the hands of her jilted lover, Don Jose. The following aragonaise (a festive dance from the region of Aragon in Spain) that opens the final act of the opera as crowds arrive a parade outside the bullring. After the serene intermezzo the suite ends with the famous march “Les Toreadores,” the entry of the bullfighters, which is actually the opening piece of the opera. Tonight, you will hear the 6 hands arrangement by Polish composer, Jakub Kowalewski.
Heitor Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No.5, arr. Myers/Wang
Heitor Villa-Lobos composed his Bachianas Brasileiras between 1930 and 1945 with Johann Sebastian Bach as his guiding light. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 was composed in two stages, the first movement being completed in 1938 with the second movement added in 1945. Uniquely scored for soprano and eight cellos, it is the most celebrated of his Bachianas and a striking example of his lifelong dialogue with Bach. Villa-Lobos did not quote Bach directly; instead, he absorbed Baroque clarity and contrapuntal thinking into a distinctly Brazilian sound world. The first movement, “Ária (Cantilena),” unfolds as a long, arching vocal line, famously wordless at its opening and close, floating above a gently undulating cello texture. The second, “Dança (Martelo),” sets a poem by Ruth Valadares Corrêa and draws on the rhythmic vitality of northeastern Brazil, its incisive accents contrasting with the lyricism of the opening movement. The unusual ensemble reflects Villa-Lobos’s own background as a cellist and his particular affinity for the instrument’s vocal warmth.
In this evening’s performance, Benjamin Myers and Hsiu-Hui Wang present a newly created arrangement for piano six hands, violin, and cello, receiving its world premiere. Reimagining the original sonority of eight cellos through the resonance and percussive breadth of three pianists, while preserving the singing lines through violin and cello, this version seeks to retain the work’s intimate, vocal character. The contrapuntal transparency inspired by Bach and the supple, expressive lyricism characteristic of Villa-Lobos emerge in a new chamber setting that both honors the original conception and offers a fresh perspective on this beloved masterpiece.
- Program Notes by Trio ToUché and GPT
HCC CONCERT SERIES
Hsien-Ann Meng, Director, HCC Concert Series
Bill Gillett, Chair, Performing Arts
HOROWITZ CENTER STAFF
Janelle Broderick - Director
Jessica Chaney - Content Coordinator
A. Lorraine Robinson - Production Manager
John Elder - Technical Director
Darius McKeiver - Business Associate
Linwood Milan – Technical Coordinator
Eric Moore - Production Electrician
Mark Smedley - Associate Technical Director
Julie Via - Audience Services Manager
Bill Watson – Gallery Manager and Curator
SPECIAL THANKS
This performance is made possible through generous support from the Galbraith-Winer Family Trust Fund and the Maryland State Arts Council.
