Music Chamber

 

The O3 Trio are currently undertaking a postgraduate diploma at Trinity College of Music, where they met in September 2009. Ruben Marques Jacinto (Portugal) has been focusing his recent career in contemporary solo and chamber repertoire, performing several world premieres. He is a founder member of the Ensemble Contemporaneus and member of the New Lisbon Orchestra. Cristina Ocaña (Spain) has played in several prestigious youth and professional orchestras across Europe - including the Malaga Chamber and Symphony Orchestras. Diego Ghymers (Chile/Belgium) has been performing as a soloist and with chamber ensembles such as the “4 hands & 4 feet piano” duet. He has performed across Spain and given conferences about Stravinsky in a variety of Conservatoires.

 

Aram Khachaturian was a pillar of the Soviet musical establishment, epitomising that régime’s ideals of art accessible to all and the integration of national minorities into the Soviet whole. He was born in an Armenian family in Georgia, but lived in Moscow from his teenage years. Folk music from his native Caucasus provides much of the material for Khachaturian’s work, lending it its loose, rhapsodic structure, languid melodies, vital rhythms and colourful tonal effects. He wrote the Trio in 1932, when he was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. It caught the attention of Prokofiev, and was the first of Khachaturian’s works to be played outside the Soviet Union. The youth of the composer is displayed not in any lack of technique or assurance of instrumental writing, but rather in an inventive, organically evolving form and an overall freshness and vitality. The first movement is a slow, melismatic meditation, with reminiscences of Scheherazade. The second movement begins as a scherzo but unexpectedly changes into a gentle folksong, leading into an ecstatic middle section that is the energetic climax of the piece. The third movement is an extended dance with several moods; its two musical subjects also appear in the Uzbek Dance Tune from Khachaturian’s Dance Suite for orchestra.