for
Piano trio: violin, cello and piano
Augusta Read Thomas
Eroica Trio
1991 Chamber Music Competition
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor at the University of Chicago. She served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Mead Composer-in-Residence from 1997 to 2006 and helped establish MusicNOW. Her orchestral work Astral Canticle was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.
In Thomas's program note, the three movements pass from the darkness of a nocturne through a dreamlike fantasia to an aubade, or dawn song.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer whose catalogue includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, and stage music. Born in New York in 1964, she studied at Northwestern University, Yale, the Royal Academy of Music, and Tanglewood, where her teachers included Oliver Knussen and Jacob Druckman. From 1997 to 2006 she was Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, helping establish its MusicNOW series and writing nine commissioned orchestral works. Her Astral Canticle was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She joined the University of Chicago as a University Professor in 2010 and founded its Center for Contemporary Composition in 2016. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Angel Chant for piano trio is comprised of three movements. Movement one, Nocturne, is a night piece of mysterious and dark nature which, in tightly knit music, exposes the trio almost as if it were one instrument, not three. The text of the music is heavy and percussive yet always reaching for lyrical expression.
The second movement, Fantaisie, takes an unconventional approach to piano trio writing in that in its architecture there are cadenzas for each of the three players. This movement suggests a dream state between night (Nocturne) and morning (Aubade) in which references to its surrounding movements inform is own structure.
Movement three, Aubade, is a song for the dawn. Closely related to the musical material exposed in Nocturne, the character of the music becomes lyrical and cantabile in Aubade.
