B3LLA Piano Trio

music that inspires

San Francisco, CA USA

BELLA's MISSION is to connect people to themselves, each other, and their communities through professional live music performances of the highest standards, reflecting shared human emotions and experiences.  BELLA sees their role as artists as inspiring people from diverse backgrounds to cherish the beauty in themselves and others.

BELLA is committed to being socially responsible and engaged artists in their community.  Towards this end, they donate a portion of all of their donations to non-profit community organizations, including those dedicated to helping people and families affected by breast cancer.

BELLA Moments Musicaux

February 23, 2012  /  Mimi Lee

We're embarking on a journey of "moments musicaux," or musical moments.  These are treasurable gems of pieces, sometimes written originally for piano trio, and other times adapted or arranged for piano trio.  Each has something truly special and heartwarming, or soul-stirring to it, drawing us as performers into a world we'd love to embrace with you. 

This Saturday we'll be previewing two of those pieces.  The first is by Dmitri Shostakovich.  But not the Shostakovich that some of you might have heard in our rendition of his second piano trio.  This Shostakovich is warm, and soulful, and full of beauty and a wealth of emotions ranging from hope to sorrow.  It's originally written for 2 violins and piano, but we have simply had one part played by the cello, usually an octave below what was written. It's gorgeous.

The second muscial moment we'll be performing is by a living composer from Estonia named Arvo Pärt.  It's called Spiegel im Spiegel which can be "translated (from the German) as, "mirror in the mirror" as well as "mirrors in the mirror", referring to the infinity of images produced by parallel plane mirrors: the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth. The English word for this phenomenon is "enfilade."  The piece is in the tintinnabular style of composition, wherein a melodic voice, operating over diatonic scales, and tintinnabular voice, operating within a triad on the tonic, accompany each other. It is about ten minutes long, and the perfect minimalist, meditative piece.

We hope you enjoy them!

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