Claremont Trio

• Piano Trio

Biography

Claremont Trio launches the 2007-08 season with return engagements at such prestigious summer festivals as the Bard Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, and the Chappaquiddick Summer Music Festival, adding debut appearances at the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival and the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. This young trio, first recipients of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award, will perform in major venues throughout the country in the 2007-08 season. The group has been invited to present the complete piano trios of Schumann and Brahms in a 3-concert series at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; they will tour Hawaii and the Midwest, and will appear at prominent concert halls in Buffalo, St.Paul, Providence, Tulsa and New York, among others.
Highlights of the Trio's 2006-07 season included the conclusion of their cycle of Beethoven's complete works for piano trio at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a tour with guest violist Ida Kavafian, and performances sponsored by the La Jolla Music Society, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Los Alamos Concert Association, the Des Moines Art Center, and Worcester's Tuckerman Hall. The Claremonts, whose reading of the Shostakovich Trio No.2 was described by the Los Angeles Times as "an inspiring, forceful performance," celebrated the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth with the release of a recording of both his piano trios, coupled with Arensky's Trio in D minor, Op.32.
In recent seasons the Claremonts have performed at the Philharmonic
Center for the Arts in Naples, FL, the Performing Arts Center at SUNY Purchase, the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, FL, Wolf Trap, and have been featured guests of the chamber music societies of Detroit, Cincinnati, Utica, Kansas City, Sedona and Louisville. Among the group's frequent New York appearances were their performance at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on the occasion of receiving the Classical Recording Foundation Debut Artist Award; a cutting edge evening at the Guggenheim Museum, which featured the Trio in its Works and Process series in a performance of Mason Bates' String Band, a work the Trio commissioned; and the group's 2005-06 season finale performance for the New York Prism Concerts at Central Synagogue , which was enthusiastically received by the New York Times.
During recent summers the Claremont Trio has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Caramoor, Ravinia, Bard, Norfolk, Moab, Deer Valley, Cape Cod Chamber Music, and Great Lakes Festivals. The Trio frequently performs the Beethoven Triple Concerto with orchestras such as the Utah Symphony, the Virginia Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony. It has also performed with many distinguished guest artists including Toby Appel, Joseph Kalichstein, Martha Katz, Jaime Laredo, Ida Kavafian, Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Sharon Robinson, and Richard Young.
The group's mentors have included Isaac Stern and Robert McDonald. The Claremont Trio's debut CD of Mendelssohn trios was released on the Arabesque label in 2004 to overwhelmingly positive critical acclaim. Gramophone magazine praised the disc for giving "large-scale performances with a sweeping, romantic sense of space and strong dramatic contrasts," while Strings celebrated the Trio's ability to "find a cool equilibrium between industry and frivolity where an elegant, totally Mendelssohnian sexiness resides."
The Claremont Trio has been featured on both Japanese and American television, and also is heard frequently in interviews on radio stations throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Australia's ABC, New York's WQXR, Boston's WGBH, Chicago's WFMT, Salt Lake City's KBYU, and Columbia University's WKCR. Other highlights of previous seasons include performances in the concert series at the American Academy in Rome; concerts in Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall at New York's Lincoln Center.