Newly restored premiere of French composer Rita Strohl’s Piano Trio No. 2 in its U.S. premiere, together with other works rarely experienced, concluding with Smetana’s monumental G minor piano trio.
Hillary Hempel, violin | Hannah Wolkstein, cello | Alissa Freeman, piano
A Program of Rarities
ASTOR PIAZOLLA Libertango (1974)
MEL BONIS Soir, Matin, op. 76 (1907)
RITA STROHL Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor (1888)
FELIPE PEDRELL Nocturne, op. 55 (1873)
BEDRICH SMETANA Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15 (1855)
Notes
RITA STROHL (1865-1941): Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor
U.S. Premiere of newly available French chamber music
"Strohl’s music deserves wider exposure; there’s a distinctly original voice here that needs to be heard." — Andrew Clements, The Guardian, Oct 10 202
Token Creek is pleased to present the Avanti Trio offering the U.S. premiere of Rita Strohl’s second piano trio. Strohl is among several forgotten and neglected composers recently brought to light by Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française, the organization founded in 2009 dedicated to the rediscovery and international promotion of the French musical heritage of the long nineteenth century (1780-1920).
Born in Brttany in 1865, Aimée Marie-Marguerite Mercédès Rita Larousse La Villette (but adopting the surname of her first husband), Rita Strohl was a precociously talented child, admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 13. There she "found the classes in music theory and composition boring and antiquated,” wrote cellist Sandra Lied Haga in The Strad.
Strohl’s first works, a string quartet and a “fantaisie” quintet, were published in the mid-1880s, following her first public performance, a piano trio in 1884. The second trio, which the Avanti Trio will premiere at Token Creek, dates from 1888 (she was 23). In the early years of her career she focused on chamber music, before turning to large-scale orchestral works and later song. She withdrew from composing fairly early on, certain her music would not be performed.
Although her early “laboratory works” are in a rather conservative idiom, “there’s plenty to sink into: sinewy writing full of bold unison octaves; Mendelssohn-esque, fairyish lucidity; multiple variation movements; a minor-leaning tonality that’s initially conventional, but later embraces chromaticism and the whole-tone scale” (The Strad, November 2024).
“[Her] music is miles away from what was traditionally taught at the Paris Conservatory at the turn of the century," wrote Sandra Lied Haga.
“Hers "is a distinctly original voice that needs to be heard" (Andrew Clements).
PIANO TRIO NO. 2 in D MINOR
Andante sostenuto - Allegro
Andante. Très lent et très mystérieux
Final
Strohl’s piano trio is performed courtesy of the Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique française, which supplied both the performance materials and permission for the Avanti Piano Trio’s U.S. premiere of the work.
The Avanti Piano Trio rehearses Rita Strohl’s second trio, final movement on August 10, 2025, in the Token Creek concert barn.
MEL BONIS Soir-Matin, op. 76 (1907)
From the Avanti Trio
Mélanie (Mel) Bonis studied at the Paris Conservatoire from 1876 to 1881, where she studied piano with César Franck and was a contemporary of Claude Debussy. She composed more than 300 works for a variety of instruments and ensembles. To avoid the bias facing women composers of the time, she adopted the gender-neutral pseudonym “Mel Bonis.” Her public presence as a composer declined after World War I, and she turned her focus to religious works and educational pieces. Many of her compositions remained unpublished, though they reveal a skilled and often overlooked composer and orchestrator.
From Edition Silvertrust
When Saint Saëns, after hearing Soir-Matin, remarked to its dedicatee Jean Gounod, "I never thought a woman could write something such as this. She knows all the clever tricks of the composer's trade," this was both a compliment and a sad commentary on the fact that women composers were basically ignored and regarded as second rate.
Mel Bonis (Melanie Helene Bonis 1858-1937) was born in Paris. A gifted but long underrated composer, she used the pseudonym Mel Bonis because she rightly felt women composers of her time weren't taken seriously as artists. Her music represents a link between the Romantic and Impressionist movements in France. Her parents discouraged her early interest in music and she taught herself to play piano until age 12, when she was finally given private lessons. A friend introduced her to Cesar Franck, who was so impressed with her abilities he made special arrangements for her to be admitted to the then all-male Paris Conservatory in 1876. She won prizes in harmony and accompaniment and showed great promise in composition, but a romance with a fellow student, Amedee Hettich, caused her parents to withdraw her from the institution in 1881. Two years later she married and raised a family. Then in 1893 she again encountered Hettich, now a famous critic; he urged her to continue composing and helped launch her career in fashionable Parisian salons, where her music made a considerable stir. Saint Saens highly praised her chamber music and could not believe that it had not been composed by a man. Although her music was much played and praised she never entered the first rank of her contemporaries as she probably would have because she lacked the necessary vanity for self-promotion. It did not help that she was a woman. As a result, by the time of her death, she and her music had fallen into obscurity. She composed over 300 works in most genres. Finally, in the 1960s, historians began to re-examine the contributions of women composers and this set the stage for Bonis's posthumous reputation.
Soir-Matin (evening and morning), composed in 1907, is in two movements. It presents two different moods. A cantabile, singing melody dominates the material in Soir which evokes a mostly calm, peaceful evening atmosphere. In contrast, Matin though quiet, features a restlessness, characteristic of awakening, which is continually heard in the sparkling running notes of the piano. It is full of chromaticism and unusual modulations that push but to not pass the boundaries of traditional tonality.
© Edition Silvertrust. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
FELIPE PEDRELL Nocturnes, op. 55 (1873)
Felipe Pedrell was one of Spain’s most distinguished and learned musicians. He was professor of music history at the Madrid Conservatory, a post he held until 1894. Pedrell believed that every country should build its music on the foundation of native song. He dreamed of creating a great Spanish musical art of truly national character, and he considered the study of the living folklore of the homeland of the utmost importance for the rebirth of his country’s music. Today, Pedrell is known less for his compositions than for the tremendous influence he had on later Spanish composers such as Albeniz and Granados.
BEDRICH SMETANA Piano Trio in G minor, op. 15 (1855)
From Kai Chistiansen:
Bedřich Smetana emerges as the first truly nationalistic Czech composer. A generation older than Dvořák, Smetana participated in revolutionary protests against the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs, emigrated to Sweden for a time, and ultimately returned to Prague a prodigal son, celebrated for his numerous operas, orchestral and piano pieces reflecting Czech culture and identity. His personal life was very difficult. Smetana buried his first wife as well as three of his four daughters who died during infancy. In his mid-fifties, Smetana developed tinnitus, eventually became deaf and ultimately succumbed to madness most likely from syphilis. But to the chamber world in particular, he bequeathed two amazing works: a late string quartet and an earlier piano trio, both passionate epics of romantic expression deeply reflecting these personal tragedies.
Smetana wrote his only piano trio in 1855 when he was just thirty-one. He dedicated the work to his oldest daughter Bedřiška who had just died at the age of four from scarlet fever, a young girl of great musical abilities with whom Smetana had an especially close relationship. He was devastated. Though he left no specific programmatic description of the trio, its grief-stricken and elegiac character is unmistakable. One of the most powerful works in the literature, it is equally historical. Influenced by Eastern-European folk music with its unbridled passion, spanning rhapsodic forms full of rich thematic variation and a piano style more Liszt than Chopin, Smetana's lone piano trio is a milestone of romanticism. It predates and significantly presages music that would soon come from the likes of Brahms and Dvořák among others.
The first movement is a towering force of anguish and despair beginning with broad, devastating gestures that continue to tighten and accelerate until the final bars of near mania. The sonata principle contrasts this trajectory with something completely different: a lyrical, tender second theme rising gracefully between vicious onslaughts. Smetana described this as one of his daughter's favorite melodies. Both the dark and light subjects significantly transform throughout the movement as the emotional tenor of the music rises to panic on one hand, shining triumph on the other. This alternation between dark and light – death and daughter - vividly continues throughout all three movements in a convincing expression of inconsolable grief illuminated "within" by nostalgia, the terror of tragedy juxtaposed with the gracious nobility of what it destroyed.
The middle movement is troubled rather than devastated. A worried scherzo unusually provides two different trios, each offsetting the surrounding gloom in its own way. The first offers a sighing, swaying melody of tender expression, the second, a march that is by turns luminous, then regal, then epic in an outpouring of bright light, again, the full heartbreaking majesty of what was but is no longer.
The finale is a swift, dashing rondo with at least three powerful evocations of Smetana's apparent music program. The opening "gallop" undeniably evokes Schubert's famous Erlking where a father and his son race on horseback, desperately fleeing death as it reaches for the child. Between episodes of frantic motion, there are soft lyrical interludes, the sigh of a child and the gentle nobility of Smetana's daughter's theme from the first movement. But the end is nigh, the contest fatal. The gallop halts, confronted by the stark, timeless dread of a funeral march, the unavoidable musical teleology of the entire trio. The music is not yet over. Smetana seems determined to end on a higher plane, the nature of which is difficult to describe: a flourish for purely musical reasons, or maybe a final affirmation of what survives, what death could not ultimately take away.
© Kai Christiansen Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Artists
Described as having “impressive energy and musicality,” the Avanti Piano Trio is a PBS-recorded group formed in 2018 in Madison, Wisconsin. The trio has performed throughout Wisconsin in venues including the Chazen Museum of Art, Stoughton Opera House, the Green Lake Music Festival, Monroe Arts Center, the UW-Madison Hamel Music Center, and concert series in Door County and Spring Green. Avanti aspires to presenting stimulating and varied piano trio repertoire, performing music of the standard canon, but also advocating for lesser known styles, composers, and works, including those by female composers.
Members are Alissa Freeman, piano, Hillary Hempel, violin, and Hannah Wolkstein, cello.
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