This was demonstrated last season when pianist Menachem Pressler brought his latest grouping to the Classical Concerts Series in Southern Pines. You will find this attribute also in the Carolina Piano Trio, which was founded in 1998 by Barbara McKenzie, with Elizabeth Anderson, then on the faculty of UNC-Greensboro, and Eric Pritchard, first violin of the Ciompi String Quartet, in residency at Duke University.
The trio comes to Weymouth Center in Southern Pines on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 3 p.m. with a new violinist, Katie Lansdale, a renowned soloist and chamber musician currently on the faculty of the Hartt School in Hartford, Conn.. (As a new father, Eric Pritchard decided to spend less time on the road this year). The three ladies will have their first tour in February with concerts in Wilmington, Morehead City, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem and Weymouth Center.
Born in Raleigh, Barbara McKenzie studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Md. with Walter Hautzig, spent 10 years in Europe playing in concert halls and international music festivals, and since returning to North Carolina has become the artistic director of concert series in Wilmington, Beaufort and Bald Head Island.
Elizabeth Anderson holds degrees from the Juilliard and Eastman Schools of Music. She was a member of the faculty of UNC-Greensboro for more than ten years before going to New York City, where she is a member of the New York City Opera orchestra.
Katie Lansdale went to Yale University where she received prizes for work in the humanities and the arts before taking advanced music degrees at the Cleveland Institute and the Manhattan School of Music. She has been a soloist with the National Symphony and the Baltimore Symphony orchestras. She has played the Bach solo works from Argentina to Utah and in far-out New York City premiered Peter Alexander’s Concerto for Electric Violin with the New York City Spectrum Orchestra.
The program opens with a piano trio by Charles Wakefield Cadman, best known for his “Land of the Sky Blue Water” and other songs with Native American themes. The trio is from his early years (1914), before he moved to Hollywood.
Charles Ives was a “Yalie” who studied composition there along with academics. He had a keen ear for opposing keys and music that was not “sissy stuff.” Katie Lansdale will play his “Largo for Violin and Piano.” Elizabeth Anderson will play a piece by a modern iconoclast, Arvo Pärt of Estonia, who has gone down the opposing keys route with serial techniques and tintinabulation and collage. His cello piece is called “Spiegel im Spiegel.” A lighter mood with a bit of ragtime and Hollywood glitz will be the finish to this unusual program. Paul Schoenfield, who now divides his time between Cleveland, Ohio and a kibbutz in Israel, filled in one night for the pianist at a restaurant in Minneapolis called Murray’s. It features a piano trio playing cafe music. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra commissioned Schoenfield to bring this sound to the stage.
Admission to the Weymouth concerts is free to members, $15 to non-members. Tickets and memberships are available at the door. For further information. call Weymouth Center at (910) 692-6261 or visit the Web site at www.weymouthcenter.org.
