Prometheus Trio Blends Old with New at Season Finale

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Photo: Wisconsin Conservatory of Music

Prometheus Trio

Prometheus Trio

Prometheus Trio’s final concert of the season includes music by Turina, Augusta Read Thomas, Beethoven and Brahms.

The Trio will open the concert with Spanish composer Joaquín Turina’s Círculo. It’s a “Fantastic Trio” where the first piece, Amanecer (Dawn), begins with the cello, ever so gently reminding the world it’s time to wake up. Mediodía (Noon), the second piece—Spanish in theme and rhythm –perhaps hints of a noon rush at work before going home for a siesta. It concludes with Crepúsculo (Dusk) where tranquility returns.

Stefanie Jacob and Scott Tisdel are founding members of the Trio; Margot Schwartz, a first violinist with the MSO, joined them seven years ago.

The Prometheus Trio always likes to blend the old and new and have chosen two compositions by Augusta Read Thomas, professor of composition in music at The University of Chicago, to close out the first half of the program. Thomas says she composes to express gratitude and that once she starts, the music seems to compose itself. Her compositions have been performed world-wide. The Trio will play her Circle around the Sun and Moon Jig (Gigue.  

Jacob claims it was coincidental that these compositions are all about time cycles: daily, monthly, and annually. A topic perhaps for discussion during the intermission or on the ride home?

Return to Classics

The second half of the program returns to the “classics” with Beethoven’s Variations, Op 44 and Brahms’ C Minor Trio, Op 101. And while this is the first time they have performed the Variations; the Brahms Trio has been performed before. I will be delighted to hear it once again.

Jacob and Tisdel were two-thirds of a trio in graduate school at Indiana University. The third member permitted them to continue using the name when Jacob suggested reestablishing a trio at the Wisconsin Conservatory to celebrate the completion of the multi-million-dollar renovation of the historic McIntosh/Goodrich Mansion, their home base. It’s safe to say that a Prometheus Trio has been around for more than 20 years. As Tisdel says, Prometheus brings to mind the well-known Overture by Beethoven. (It’s part of the music written by Beethoven for a ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, presented to the Archduchess Maria Theresa.)  

Jacob volunteered that planning the program is a cooperative effort and that they enjoy finding new material as well as playing the classics of the trio literature. Hence the exciting Brahms trio and the classical, at times whimsical, Beethoven Variations.

The concert takes place in the Helen Bader Recital Hall, its music salon, originally a ballroom of the McIntosh-Goodrich- Mansion. The mansion is on Prospect Avenue’s “Gold Coast” and was built in the Neo-Classical Revival style in 1904 for Charles L. McIntosh, an executive from New York, who moved to the Midwest to become a director at Milwaukee Harvester Company. He later merged it with other companies to form International Harvester.

It's a small hall with a stage at one end for the performers. The plaster work on the ceiling and complementary décor provides an exquisite venue for chamber concerts and the acoustics are superb. For those not familiar with chamber music this is a unique opportunity to listen to an intimate form of music in a salon-setting as if you were royalty living centuries ago with the Trio in your personal employ.

The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. May 9 and 10 at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, 1584 N. Prospect Ave. Tickets can be purchased and further information found at wcmusic.org. For evening concerts like these, complimentary parking is available at Milwaukee Eye Care, 1684 N Prospect Ave, one block north of the Conservatory.