Piano Trio

The piano trio is the most basic of jazz combos, but it is also one that provides an enormous amount of freedom and an infinite number of possibilities. The trios helmed by Art Tatum and Bill Evans were at the polar extremes of mainstream jazz, but who wouldn't rank them among the greatest of all time? Today we have trios as diverse as Keith Jarrett's and The Bad Plus, but they are so different that you wouldn't play their music at the same dinner party. One is tempted to say we are in a renaissance period of the piano trio, but we are always in a piano trio renaissance.

The piano trio is the most basic of jazz combos, but it is also one that provides an enormous amount of freedom and an infinite number of possibilities. The trios helmed by Art Tatum and Bill Evans were at the polar extremes of mainstream jazz, but who wouldn't rank them among the greatest of all time? Today we have trios as diverse as Keith Jarrett's and The Bad Plus, but they are so different that you wouldn't play their music at the same dinner party. One is tempted to say we are in a renaissance period of the piano trio, but we are always in a piano trio renaissance.

"It really is a total sacrilege, what we're about to do," remarked Alisa Weilerstein at the Weilerstein Trio's Thursday night concert. The sacrilege in question was an arrangement for piano trio of Leos Janacek's First String Quartet. Written in 1923, this extraordinary and inventive piece was inspired by Tolstoy's novella "The Kreutzer Sonata. " So was a piano trio he wrote 15 years earlier, and there is speculation that significant portions of the trio were recycled in the quartet.

PICK OF THE DAY Red and yellow and . . . Can you name all the colors in Joseph's coat? Thanks to Sing-A-Long "Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" you'll rattle them off with ease and admire the garment worn by Donny Osmond (feel free to adorn yourself with a fabulous costume). The film also stars Joan Collins as Potiphar's temptress wife. Tonight at 7 ( through Feb. 19). $15, $12 kids and seniors. Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St., Arlington. 781-646-4849. www.regenttheatre.com TODAY Name change Beethoven's "Eroica" was originally named for Napoleon Bonaparte, but when the latter annoyed the...

PICK OF THE DAY Red and yellow and . . . Can you name all the colors in Joseph's coat? Thanks to Sing-A-Long "Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" you'll rattle them off with ease and admire the garment worn by Donny Osmond (feel free to adorn yourself with a fabulous costume). The film also stars Joan Collins as Potiphar's temptress wife. Tonight at 7 ( through Feb. 19). $15, $12 kids and seniors. Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St., Arlington. 781-646-4849. www.regenttheatre.com TODAY Name change Beethoven's "Eroica" was originally named for Napoleon Bonaparte, but when the latter annoyed the...

The Gardner Museum's popular chamber music series returned from its hiatus on Sunday and took up residence in its gleaming new home. It was the first public classical performance in Calderwood Hall, and a capacity crowd turned out for the occasion, also broadcast live on WGBH-FM. In a nice touch, the afternoon's program sidestepped the tired gala formula of celebrity musicians playing only certified masterworks and instead featured a youthful ensemble, the Claremont Trio, premiering a new piece by emerging composer Sean Shepherd alongside music by Mozart and Mendelssohn.

GOING MAINSTREAM: The Actors Studio of Newburyport presents "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove," by the late lesbian playwright Jane Chambers, for three weekends opening Friday. When a straight woman on vacation unexpectedly enters a close-knit lesbian community, her presence challenges the group. There are issues of differences, trust, and fears of being revealed as gay, which portray the reality for lesbians in the 1970s. "When the plays of Jane Chambers were first produced 30 years ago, they were performed by all-lesbian casts with an almost all-gay...

ROCKPORT — Chamber music necessitates a certain compromise between the individual and the collective . . . actually, that platitude crumbles with the Boston Trio, a chamber music group that is often at its best when its players are behaving most like soloists. When that proclivity intersects with repertoire that thrives on simultaneity — say, Charles Ives’s Piano Trio, which the group played in Rockport on Thursday — the results are breathtaking. Ives’s college-days reminiscence replaces nostalgia with a sense of the brain’s unruly way of...

NEWPORT, R.I. -- Mark Malkovich III, general director of the Newport Music Festival for the last 30 years, celebrated his 75th birthday Sunday night, and he announced that his present to himself was getting South African pianist Marian Friedman for a recital. Friedman is a connoisseur's pianist, whose recordings -- and there are only two -- are eagerly passed hand to hand. She studied in this country in the '70s; when she was at Indiana University, her recitals packed the house, something faculty and guest celebrities couldn't always count on....

Curiously until this weekend the Boston Chamber Music Society has programmed Schubert's evergreen "Trout" Quintet only once in its 22-year history. More curiously still, when the group did decide to return to one of the most beloved of all chamber-music pieces, it landed in a time frame full of competing performances. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is scheduled to play it tomorrow afternoon in the Gardner Museum, and the piano trio Triple Helix will join friends at Boston University to play it there on Monday night.

GOING MAINSTREAM: The Actors Studio of Newburyport presents "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove," by the late lesbian playwright Jane Chambers, for three weekends opening Friday. When a straight woman on vacation unexpectedly enters a close-knit lesbian community, her presence challenges the group. There are issues of differences, trust, and fears of being revealed as gay, which portray the reality for lesbians in the 1970s. "When the plays of Jane Chambers were first produced 30 years ago, they were performed by all-lesbian casts with an almost all-gay audience," said Sherry...

The Gardner Museum's popular chamber music series returned from its hiatus on Sunday and took up residence in its gleaming new home. It was the first public classical performance in Calderwood Hall, and a capacity crowd turned out for the occasion, also broadcast live on WGBH-FM. In a nice touch, the afternoon's program sidestepped the tired gala formula of celebrity musicians playing only certified masterworks and instead featured a youthful ensemble, the Claremont Trio, premiering a new piece by emerging composer Sean Shepherd alongside music by Mozart and Mendelssohn.

TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON, GERI ALLEN, AND ESPERANZA SPALDING TRIO At: Scullers, tonight and tomorrow night , 8 and 10 p.m.; Sunday, 4 and 7 p.m. Tickets: $30. 617-562-4111, scullersjazz.com. It shouldn't be this way, but it's still the case that when a jazz group forms in which all the players are women, that fact attracts at least as much notice as the music they perform. It's unavoidable: all-women groups remain rare in a jazz world where most performers, listeners, and critics are male.

CAMBRIDGE - "Parfait" is a kind of layered dessert. It's also the French word for "perfect. " It would be hard to call any concert of music perfect, but the one - titled "Parfait" - that Radius Ensemble presented at Longy School of Music on Saturday was layered and both savory and sweet, a toothsome end to any evening. The concert also had a cinematic theme (dessert and a movie?), beginning with Jan Bach's "Music for a Low-Budget Epic" (2001) and ending with Michael Gandolfi's "Resonance Frames" (2003)

MARLBORO MUSIC At: Marlboro, Vt., Sunday MARLBORO, Vt. - The late violinist and violist Philipp Naegele, in the closing essay of a booklet devoted to marking this year's 60th anniversary of Marlboro Music, sets his sights on one particularly beloved apple tree. Old and weather-beaten, comely and gnarled, it stands in the middle of the Marlboro campus, surrounded by green hills. Naegele, who came to Marlboro at the very beginning, saw this old yet ageless tree as a survivor whose gift for adaptation and "re-rooting" mirrored that of Marlboro's founders,...

They are not household names, but the three musicians who joined together fruitfully on Saturday night at Jordan Hall — violinist Nai-Yuan Hu, cellist Bion Tsang, and pianist Ning An — are all well-established US-based performers with belts notched by career prizes and competition victories. The program, presented by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, seemed designed to showcase them individually and collectively, and did so with the help of chamber works — by Kodaly and Arensky — a shade more unusual than one finds on your typical...

When do composers become composers? Is it the moment when they first jot down a melody? When they find their "voice" -- that notoriously hard-to-define yet crucial sign of something new and unique? Or when they first place their work in someone else's hands, entrusting its interpretation to another? Dinosaur Annex, Boston's venerable new-music group, explored those questions last weekend in "A Salute to Young Composers," a refreshing series of events designed to open the process of creating music to kids and young adults.

CAMBRIDGE -- The mi3 is a piano trio of a different color. Pandelis Karayorgis usually performs on acoustic piano, but in the mi3 he plays a Fender Rhodes electric keyboard using wah-wah and distortion pedals. The result by turn resembles organ, guitar, and science-fiction sound effects. Yet the mi3 is deeply rooted in the adventurous jazz piano tradition that is Karayorgis's metier. Sunday night at the Zeitgeist Gallery, the trio featured not only Karayorgis's knotty compositions but also several lesser-known tunes by Thelonious Monk, as well as two by Hasaan Ibn Ali , a shadowy figure...

Emmanuel Music opened a new season under a new music director on Sunday, and, as was inevitable, one felt the absence of the man who founded and built the series of chamber concerts. Craig Smith’s programming touch was unerring — there was always something novel and something delightful in his surveys — and his touch as a pianist was like a line of gold filigree through any concert. John Harbison, who stepped in as acting director after Smith’s death in 2007, followed his own tastes, as he should have, and last season combined works of Schoenberg and Haydn, an unlikely and...