Swedish brilliance
with Phaeton Piano Trio (piano trio)
Franz Berwald: Piano Trio No. 3 in D minor
Amanda Maier: Piano Trio in E flat major
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Piano Trio in D minor op. 49
Alongside Alice Tegnér and Elfrida Andrée, Amanda Maier was one of the Swedish women who made a name for themselves as composers at the end of the 19th century - she was even the first woman to pass the music director exam in Sweden and played her own violin concerto in 1876 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Carl Reinecke. Her husband, the German-Dutch composer Julius Röntgen, associated with Johannes Brahms and a lifelong friend of Edvard Grieg, supported her in this endeavor.
The Phaeton Piano Trio - three internationally acclaimed soloists from the Kronberg Academy and the Royal Academy of Music London, guests at institutions such as the Frick Collection in New York and the Library of Congress in Washington - surrounds Maier's work with two trios by men in which the woman's brilliance is worthily reflected: the Stockholm Schubert contemporary Franz Berwald and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose D minor Trio is one of the most virtuoso works of this genre.