Trio Duende Mainstage Concert
The Eureka Chamber Music Series presents its final concert set of the 2024/2025 season, featuring last season’s best-selling ensemble Trio Duende. Trio Duende is a longtime collaboration between Grammy Award winning pianist Awadagin Pratt, Avery Fisher Career Grant winning cellist Sophie Shao, and San Francisco Bay Area violinist Tom Stone, who was a founding member of the Cypress String Quartet as well as being the ECMS artistic director. They will perform weekend concerts on Saturday, May 3rd at 7:30 p.m. at Calvary Lutheran Church in Eureka, and on Sunday, May 4th at 3:00 p.m. at The Lutheran Church of Arcata.
The Saturday Mainstage Concert repertoire includes “Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8” by Zoltán Kodály, the Hungarian 20th century composer who was also the creator of the Kodály method of music education, “Lonely Angel for Piano Trio” by the nature inspired contemporary Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, and the solo piano work “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24” by the revered Romantic composer, pianist, and conductor Johannes Brahms.
The Sunday Concert and Conversation features entirely different repertoire in a more casual setting, allowing time for dialogue between the artists and audience. The program includes “Sonata for Violin and Cello,” an early 20th century masterwork dedicated to Claude Debussy by the great French composer Maurice Ravel, and an early work from Brahms, the poetic and lyrical “Ballades, Op. 10” for solo piano.
Mainstage Concert tickets are $40 general and $10 for students. Concert and Conversation tickets are $20 general and $5 for students. Purchasing tickets in advance is recommended for this popular concert series, and there are no added fees or service charges when ordering tickets online. Please visit eurekachambermusic.org and follow the “purchase tickets” link. Any remaining tickets will be sold at the door.
A common thread that runs throughout both the history of Eureka Chamber Music Series and Trio Duende is the influence of Tom Stone, who is both a longtime performing artist and entrepreneur, as well as a dedicated collaborator. As artistic director of ECMS, Stone is currently responsible for selecting and contracting the exceptional talent that the series presents to local audiences.
The current non-profit organization, established in 2019 by a group of professionals who were also long-time concert goers, was born from a labor of love started decades before by Pearl and Bob Micheli, a conservatory trained pianist and voice teacher, and a fine amateur violinist, respectively. The Michelis moved to Eureka in the early nineteen-nineties and began hiring classical musicians to travel to Humboldt County and play concerts for a small but dedicated audience. One of those ensembles was Stone’s Cypress String Quartet. Upon his first visit, Stone immediately fell in love with the beauty of the Northern California coast and with the wonderful people he met living behind the redwood curtain.
Ultimately, the CSQ became a frequent guest of the series. Stone remembers these visits fondly. “I now come up to Humboldt every other month and feel like a part of the community. The intrigue that I experienced when I first performed in Humboldt in the 1990’s has grown into a genuine love and appreciation for Humboldt and its amazing people,” Stone recalls.
Stone and Awadagin Pratt met when they were teenagers and became fast friends and musical collaborators. When the Cypress String Quartet decided to disband after twenty successful years together, Stone and Pratt began discussing the idea of forming a trio, and Pratt immediately thought of Sophie Shao as the perfect cellist to complete the group. These three friends have each logged thousands of performances all over the world, but they still find the time and inclination to come together to explore the beauty and intimacy of the piano trio repertoire, as well as the various duo combinations to be explored with piano, violin, and cello.
The chief beneficiary of this phenomenon, though, seems to be the audience right here in Humboldt County. “What I’m most proud of,” says Stone, “is the extent to which we have dramatically expanded our educational and community outreach programs. Not only are we presenting incredible artists, but we are reaching thousands of students and adults in our community each season. And it feels like we are just getting started!”
Through his kaleidoscopic career as a pianist, conductor, educator, and curator of memorable musical moments, Awadagin Pratt is actively inventing the artistic world he longs to live in — a world that shines light on rich voices of the past and present, amplifies the diverse talents of today’s brightest creative minds, and paves the way for a new generation of inventive musical artists. Since launching onto the international stage after winning the prestigious Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1992 and receiving a 1994 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Awadagin has received acclaim for delivering “forceful, imaginative, and precisely tinted” performances by the Washington Post and is hailed as “one of the great and distinctive American pianists and conductors of our time” by WGBH, Boston.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pratt began studying piano at the age of six. Three years later, having moved to Normal, Illinois with his family, he also began studying violin. At the age of 16 he entered the University of Illinois where he studied piano, violin, and conducting. He remains the only graduate of the Peabody Institute to earn performance certificates in three areas — violin, piano, and conducting — and has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Johns Hopkins University and honorary doctorates from Illinois Wesleyan University, Susquehanna University, and the Boston Conservatory. After two decades as Professor and Artist in Residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Pratt moved to the west coast, where he is now Professor of Piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as well as a guest conductor and piano soloist all over the globe.
Pratt’s 2023 album “Stillpoint” is a collection of six newly-commissioned works of profound grace, power, and depth, composed by a group of stylistically diverse composers for piano, string orchestra, and vocal ensemble, featuring Pratt, plus the ensembles A Far Cry and A Roomful of Teeth. Featuring Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds,” “Stillpoint” won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Cellist Sophie Shao, winner of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and top prizes at the Rostropovich and Tchaikovsky competitions, is a versatile and passionate artist whose performances the New York Times has described as “eloquent, powerful,” the LA Times noted as “impressive” and the Washington Post called “deeply satisfying.” Shao has appeared as soloist to critical acclaim throughout the United States and commissioned Howard Shore’s cello concerto “Mythic Gardens,” performing the premiere with Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, the UK premiere with Keith Lockhart and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and European premiere with Ludwig Wicki and the 21st Century Orchestra. She also premiered Richard Wilson’s “The Cello Has Many Secrets” and Shih-Hui Chen’s multimedia concerto “Our Son is Not Coming Home to Dinner.” Shao has appeared as soloist throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, with the Houston Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, and Pacific Symphony.
Shao’s recordings include the “Complete Bach Suites,” Andre Previn’s “Reflections for Cello and English Horn and Orchestra” on EMI Classics, Richard Wilson’s “Diablerie” and “Brash Attacks” and Barbara White’s “My Barn Having Burned to the Ground, I Can Now See the Moon” on Albany Records, Howard Shore’s original score for the movie “The Betrayal on Howe Records,” “Marlboro Music Festival’s 50th Anniversary” on Bridge Records, Herschel Garfein’s “The Layers” on Asic Records, and Howard Shore’s “Mythic Gardens” on Sony Classical. Her new solo album, “CanCan Macabre,” has just been released on Centaur Records.
A native of Houston, Texas, Shao began playing the cello at age six, and studied with Shirley Trepel, the principal cellist of the Houston Symphony. At age thirteen she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying cello with David Soyer and chamber music with Felix Galimir. After graduating from the Curtis Institute, she continued her cello studies with Aldo Parisot at Yale University, receiving a B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale College and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music, where she was enrolled as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is currently Associate Professor of Cello at the University of Connecticut.
As a founding member of the Cypress String Quartet, Tom Stone performed thousands of concerts throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Praised by Gramophone for “artistry of uncommon insight and cohesion,” and by the New York Times for “tender, deeply expressive” interpretations, the CSQ recorded over 15 albums and are heard regularly on radio stations throughout the world.
Stone was born in Chicago where he studied music with Hilel Kagan. At age 16 he attended Tanglewood Music Festival where he coached with Eugene Lehner of the Kolisch Quartet and played in an orchestra under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. After this experience, his focus on music became increasingly intense. Stone went on to pursue musical studies at the Eastman School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. His major teachers have included Donald Weilerstein, György Sebők, and Merry Peckham.
DATES/TIMES
- Saturday, May 3 : 7:30-9:30 p.m.
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