Mithras Trio

 That was a MAGNIFICENT concert!

The trio is composed of Thomas Mathias on violin, Ben Tarlton on cello and Dominic Degavino on piano, and they are brilliant musicians.  The trio was founded in 2017, but Thomas and Ben only joined the line up this year, so they haven't been playing together for very long.  You'd never know, though, because they seemed perfectly matched.

They started with Mozart - the Piano Trio in B flat from 1786, which is beautiful.

Then they played a piece from a composer I was unfamiliar with.  George Enescu was Romanian, and he wrote his Piano Trio in A Minor in 1916.  However, it remained unfinished until after his death in 1955, when it was found among his papers and edited by the pianist Hilda Jerea.

The musicians said that it was a difficult piece to play for all three instruments, and they'd enjoyed the challenge of getting to grips with it.  They also spent the afternoon in one of the local schools, working with the children and introducing them to the music.

After the interval (with amazing cake as usual - I had the Spanish orange cake) they played the longest piece, Brahms' Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major.  This is an unusual piece because Brahms first wrote it in 1854, when he was twenty one, and came back to it in 1889 to revise it.

The applause was rapturous.  Everyone I spoke to afterwards agreed that we'd been listening to something very special. 

In the interval I met a couple who are new to Hay, as they were admiring the church organ.  So I was able to tell them the story of how it came to be in the church, thanks to Father Richard.