Our season opens with an interesting experiment, inspired by the Clements Prize composition competition. This event was held in November last year at London’s Conway Hall and involved workshops, performances and adjudications of six new pieces for piano trio. The Luton audience can now hear those works and will be invited to vote for their favourite. On this occasion however they will make their choice without knowing which title belongs to which piece – a kind of blind tasting! It will be fascinating to see how the two outcomes compare. It may afford an insight into how much correlation there is between music and its association with other ‘ideas’. How significantly do the clues afforded by the title of a piece affect its most immediate communication and our understanding of it as listeners?

I hope this will be an interesting introduction to the theme of this year’s season – The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music. Making this experiment possible is the Fidelio Trio, long-standing friends of Luton Music and our expert guide to this set of intriguing new pieces. The composers come from all over the world and the range of style is stimulatingly diverse as a result – simply reading the titles of the six works listed below will perhaps give you an idea of how varied is the range of these fascinating pieces.

The second half of the concert is given over to one of the greatest masterpieces of the piano trio canon – Beethoven’s epic Archduke Trio from 1811, dedicated to the composer’s patron Archduke Rudolph of Austria.

Welcome to the new season!

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)