The Family That Plays Together

L to R: Emmy Tisdel, Stefanie Jacob, Scott Tisdel with Meaghan Heinrich in the back. Photo courtesy of Stefanie Jacob.

The Prometheus Trio closes the season with works playing to the strengths of the selected composers: a set of variations for cello and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven, a melodic duo for violin and piano by Johannes Brahms, folk-infused conversations between violin and cello by Zoltán Kodály, and a playful, jazzy trio by Paul Schoenfield.

Trio founders Stefanie Jacob and Scott Tisdel, who have featured guest violinists this season, return to an audience favorite — their daughter, Emmy Tisdel Lohr. An ideal match for the trio, Lohr recently moved from Arizona to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to pursue teaching and performance in Los Alamos and nearby Santa Fe. A recent member of the Tucson Symphony, Lohr has studied at Oberlin, Rice University, McGill University and the University of Arizona.

The evening breaks from the usual programming by including only one trio, focusing instead on an even more intimate experience — a trio of duets.

Beethoven (1770–1827) wrote “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” Op. 66, in 1796; it is a set of variations on a theme from Mozart‘s Die Zauberflöte — Papageno’s comic aria in which the bird-catcher laments his lack of female companionship. This playful song seems ready-made for variations. Beethoven begins with a nearly music-box piano introduction and adds increasingly decorated variations shared by cello and piano. One writer, for the Vancouver Recital Society, describes the result as “twelve sharply chiseled operatic duets, widely differentiated in character like the comic personalities in the Singspiel from which the theme is derived.”

Brahms (1833–1897) is a composer frequently featured by the Prometheus Trio, and this recital features his Sonata for Piano and Violin in D minor, Op. 108 (1886–88). Written near the end of his career, “Brahms shows himself to be a master intellect and craftsman, here in complete control of his distinctive materials,” critic Orrin Howard has written. This D Minor work is more complex and dramatic than his other violin sonatas. Three simple motifs are introduced at the start. Howard says “these highly concentrated motifs, so mysterious in their first appearances… are put through a huge variety of compositional and emotional transformations.” After a cavatina-like adagio and a presto movement, “the finale is kaleidoscopic in its changing moods, which range from impetuosity to Hungarian pensiveness to chorale-like calm.”

The Duo, Op. 7 (1914) for violin and cello by Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) is structurally very different from the other works on the program. Says writer Barbara Leish, “The work gets its flavor from features that it shares with Magyar folk music: the pentatonic themes, free-flowing melodies that range from languorous to fierce, independence of the phrases, speech-like patterns, fluid rhythms, and underlying rhythmic ostinatos.” Violin and cello pass melodies between them, each taking turns supporting the other. Writing about its emotionally intense central movement, musicologist Kai Christensen notes that “the free, complex rhythms and the movement’s intensely heartfelt lyricism, which occasionally bursts forth in deep torment, evoke the wild and poignant character of the Hungarian folk fiddle tradition.” The final movement reflects the character of a verbunkos (recruiting dance), with rapid changes between slow and fast tempos.

The concert closes with a trio, Café Music (1986), a cheerful, jazz-inflected work by the contemporary composer Paul Schoenfield (1947–2024). A classical pianist known for compositions that weave together classical, folk, popular and Jewish musical traditions, he once worked as the house guest pianist at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, playing background music ranging from early 20th-century American and Viennese light classics to gypsy and Broadway styles. That experience led to an invitation “to write a kind of high-class dinner music” piece suitable for a concert hall, as program annotator Steven Ledbetter writes. He describes the trio as drawing its thematic styles, harmonies, and characteristic gestures from the restaurant repertoire as raw material for an original and more demanding work.

Select the composition names to preview the music on YouTube. Each of these works is well represented online.

The concert begins at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 20, at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, 1584 N. Prospect Ave. Parking is made easy by an arrangement with Milwaukee Eye Clinic, which offers convenient complimentary parking at 1684 N. Prospect Ave., just one block north. Tickets may be purchased online, by calling 414-276-5760, or at the door.

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