25 Decades: The Horszowski Trio

[image: The Horszowski Trio. Inset: William Anderson]

Since their New York debut in 2011, the Horszowski Trio – Jesse Mills, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano – has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, the Far East, and India, earning a reputation as one of the most vital chamber ensembles of their generation. The centerpiece of their concert is the US premiere of 25 Decades, a piano trio by William Kentner Anderson — composer, guitarist, and Director of Classical and New Music for The Village Trip — performed alongside Brahms' Piano Trio No. 2 in C major, Op 87, a pairing that sets Anderson's new work in direct conversation with the Romantic tradition it both inherits and unsettles.

Brahms understood the bourgeois interior as both refuge and horizon — a world worth holding together, even as its edges frayed. Anderson's composition is in quiet argument with that inheritance: musical elements that cohere, that genuinely reach toward one another, while registering — just beneath the surface — the centrifugal forces that no amount of craft can entirely resolve. The work does not mourn this. It simply knows it.

Anderson comes to composition from a post-maximalist perspective, having worked closely with Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and George Walker, among others. The Horszowski Trio, a passionate advocate for new music, has commissioned and premiered numerous works, making them natural collaborators for a piece as ambitious and searching as this one.

The concert also features a Homage to the New York School with “Etude No 5 for Solo Piano: Rain at Funeral March – Homage to Morton Feldman” (2005) by Augusta Read Thomas; “Projection 1 for Solo Cello” (1950), and “For Aaron Copland for Solo Violin” (1981) by Morton Feldman; and “Suite for Toy Piano” (1948) by John Cage.

Morton Feldman and John Cage met in January 1950 at Carnegie Hall, both men walking out of a New York Philharmonic performance after Webern's Symphony rather than sit through the Rachmaninoff that followed. Cage was living at 326 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side, and Feldman moved into the same building. That shared address is where the New York School (Feldman, Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown) effectively formed.

Feldman’s deepest affinities were with the painters — Philip Guston above all (a friendship that ruptured painfully), Rothko, de Kooning, Frankenthaler — and that's a Village and Tenth Street world: the Club on East Eighth, the Cedar on University Place. Rothko Chapel, For Philip Guston, De Kooning, For Frank O'Hara — his titles are practically a downtown address book.

The Horszowski Trio takes its inspiration from the musicianship, integrity, and humanity of the pre-eminent pianist Mieczysław Horszowski, whose last pupil at the Curtis Institute was the Trio's own pianist. The New Yorker thought them "the most compelling American group to come on the scene" while the Boston Globe found them "eloquent and enthralling."