At the turn of the 20th century, two great trios bear witness to a radical evolution in chamber music. Ethel Smyth’s trio, composed in 1880 while she was still a student in Leipzig, is deeply rooted in Romanticism. Charlotte Sohy’s 1931 work, on the other hand, blends melancholy lyricism with far more daring harmonies. A program presented by the brilliant young Trio Zeliha!

Ethel Smyth recounts in her memoirs that the idea of studying in Leipzig came from a music-loving governess, and that in order to persuade her parents to allow her to do so, she refused to speak, to leave her room, or to go to church… In the end, she persuaded them to do so, and thus lived through a period she would describe as “the happiest of [her] life”. Her Trio, dating from 1880, is still marked by the influence of the composers and performers she passionately admired at the time, such as Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. However, Smyth would later leave Germany and Romantic music behind, and enter the twentieth century head-on. She met with decisive success with her opera Der Wald, presented at Covent Garden and then at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903. That same year, she met Winnaretta Singer-Polignac, with whom she fell in love at first sight, and whom she visited in Paris in the spring. Did Smyth meet Charlotte Sohy on her travels to the continent in the years that followed? It’s possible – we know that Sohy’s husband, Marcel Labey, played for the Princesse de Polignac in 1905, and that after her wedding, she was a regular guest of another famous art salon, that of Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux. Smyth and Sohy both enjoyed the artistic ferment of the last decade of the Belle Epoque. But it was much later, in 1931, that Charlotte Sohy completed the composition of her Trio, premiered at the Salle Erard. Marked by a profound lyricism, the work also bears witness to the harmonic innovations of French music at the turn of the century, and to the irreversible upheavals in the musical world since the composition, fifty years earlier, of Smyth’s Trio.