Washington University’s Eliot Trio to present annual concert April 19

Washington University’s Eliot Trio will perform music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 19, in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Tickets are $10, or $5 for seniors and Washington University faculty and staff. Student admission is free. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and at the door. The 560 Music Center is located at 560 Trinity Ave., near the intersection with Delmar Boulevard. For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email kschultz@artsci.wustl.edu.

Seth Carlin

The Eliot Trio consists of Seth Carlin, professor of music and director of the piano program in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences; violinist David Halen, concertmaster for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, also with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Named for Washington University founder William Greenleaf Eliot, the group was established by Carlin in the early 1990s and is dedicated to performing masterworks of the piano trio literature. It typically presents one concert each year.

The April 19 program will open with Mozart’s Trio in G major, K. 564. This light yet flawlessly crafted work was written in Vienna in 1788, amidst an especially productive period that also saw the completion of Mozart’s last three symphonies. Next on the program will be Faure’s Trio in D minor opus 120, his only piano trio, written in 1922-23, when the composer was 78. The evening will conclude with Mendelssohn’s Trio opus 66 in C minor (1845), selected to mark the bicentennial of the composer’s birth.

Carlin has performed as soloist with orchestras around the world and with conductors such as Roger Norrington, Nicholas McGegan and Leonard Slatkin. In the past several years he has performed Beethoven’s “Triple” Concerto with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and appeared as soloist with the San Francisco Philharmonia Baroque, the period-instrument orchestra. He has played on French, Swedish, Chinese and German national television and radio and in recent years has given concerts in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and England. In 1992-1993 he performed the cycle of Schubert’s complete keyboard sonatas on fortepiano in both St. Louis and New York.

Halen — a 2002 recipient of the Saint Louis Arts and Entertainment award for excellence — has been with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra since 1991 and was appointed concertmaster in 1995. He frequently appears as a soloist, both with the symphony orchestra and in performance around the country, and often teams with Carlin for local chamber concerts. As co-founder and artistic director of the Innsbrook Institute, at Innsbrook, MO, Halen also coordinates a weeklong summer festival of chamber music performance and training for aspiring artists. He plays a violin made by Johannes Baptiste Guadagnini in Milan in 1753.

Ranheim joined the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and also holds the principal chair of the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder. He previously served as associate principal cello of the Fort Worth Symphony and has performed and toured with the orchestras of Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore. He also has served as principal and assistant principal cello with the New World Symphony, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Aspen Festival Orchestra and Quebec City’s critically acclaimed Le Violons du Roy. A committed advocate of contemporary music, Ranheim also has performed world-premiere works by Stephen Paulus, Paul Schoenfield and Steven Heitzig.