The Astatine Piano Trio were joined by the husband and wife team of Sally Beamish and Peter Thomson for a mixed media concert on 27 February.

First on the menu was Haydn's Piano Trio Hob. XV: 28.  Haydn's chamber music has nowadays attained proper recognition for its originality and mastery of the medium, characterised as it is by an elegance and ease of expression which in turn requires close attention from the performers if it is to be heard to best advantage.

In their performance the Astatines brought out all the elements one could hope for musical ideas being taken up, developed, played with, and communicated with enthusiasm. All the elements one associates with Haydn were here - elegance, wit, hints of Sturm und Drang, and above all, sheer enjoyment in making music together; Papa Haydn, showing us what he can do, with a twinkle in his eye.

The second course was more substantial - Schumann's Piano Quartet Op.47, where the Trio was joined by Sally Beamish on viola. This work shows the contrasting aspects of Schumann's (surely Bi-Polar) personality, which he himself identified and named as Florestan and Eusebius - the one wild, extroverted, and impulsive, the other dreamy, introspective, and melancholic. In this quartet these two aspects work well together, and the changes of mood were well communicated and controlled by the players. Particularly impressive was the playing in the 3rd movement which lived up to the composer's Andante Cantabile marking and brought out every drop of the emotion in the writing.

After the interval, Sally Beamish and Peter Thomson introduced Sally's work The Seafarer, an Anglo-Saxon Poem in translation, set for Piano Trio and Speaker, and given an extra dimension by images created by Jila Peacock, projected on a screen behind the performers. 

The combination of spoken word and instruments is arguably the most difficult method of communication to bring off in a concert hall, but Peter Thomson managed to communicate the words of the Poem without being over-theatrical, while the music created an atmosphere both bleak and teeming with life, set in a vast space, the latter emphasised both by the spare instrumental writing and the images displayed.

The reaction of the capacity audience was enough to demonstrate how well the artists had achieved their aim and brought the concert to a very satisfying conclusion.