Here begins our first tour back to Australia and New Zealand in 2013! We are so glad to be back! Sydney couldn’t be more perfect at this time of year. The first thing we noticed when leaving Sydney airport was the air – it is warm and smells sweet, like flowers and eucalypts. Trees and greenery are everywhere; we feel like we have landed in paradise after having just spent months surrounded by grey concrete and snow. One good thing about jetlag is that you wake early enough to watch the sun come up – on our first morning back home in the Blue Mountains, we woke at 4am to watch the sunrise. It’s absolutely magical – the kookaburras begin laughing at the moment that the sun appears.

Even though I make this trip three times a year, I still find it so surreal how you can just cross seasons in the space of 24 hours. Before 24 hour flight:

After 24 hour flight:

This tour is going to be quite different from any other one we have done, because we're without our cellist this time. Martin injured in an accident with a taxi that ran a red light while he was riding his bike in Berlin. Unfortunately he has broken his wrist! It is healing ok, and he'll be fine, but it means that he's out of action for the next month. 

So, after a really unlucky accident, we've been really grateful that Julian Smiles (the wonderful cellist of the Goldner Quartet and the Australia Ensemble) has agreed to step in for Martin for the first half of the tour. Julian will be performing with us in New Zealand, Sydney, Dubbo, Batehaven and Castlemaine. Then for the second half of the tour, we're flying out an amazing cellist from Berlin, Elena Cheah. Elena was principal cello of the Staatskapelle Berlin and also the Berlin Deutsche Oper Orchestra and we have been working together with her in Berlin since Martin broke his wrist. Elena will be playing concerts with us in Melbourne, Mornington Peninsula, Macedon, Dunolly and Hamilton, before we all fly to Dubai for our final concert of the tour. Then we will head back home to Berlin until we set off on our next trip. So this is going to be a very interesting tour for us – sad that it's not with Martin, but with superstar cellists to replace him all the way!

We will be performing some beautiful trios on this tour; a bubbly Haydn Piano Trio in E, Schubert's magnificent Piano Trio No 1 in B Flat, Mendelssohn's turbulent Piano Trio No 2 in C Minor and an arrangement by Elena Kats-Chernin of her popular Wild Swans Suite.

This will be the first of three Australia-wide tours our trio will be undertaking in 2013. We will be performing nine concerts in Australia this time at some really beautiful venues, which we're really looking forward to visiting. Now we have three days of rehearsals with Julian at the University of NSW to cover all of our repertoire, before leaving for our first concert in New Zealand! Luckily we are getting lots of sunlight on our skin to help get over jet lag!

11/03/13

Wellington is a gorgeous city. When we landed here at 11pm, the air here smelt even sweeter than in Sydney, with the honey blossoms that are in bloom at the moment. The purpose of our trip was a concert for the Waikanae Music Society – a wonderful organization with over 600 members (very impressive for a chamber music society in a city of only 10,000 people). Waikanae has a large community of retirees who all seem to be very intelligent, interesting and well-travelled, and who are equally knowledgeable and passionate about classical music. This was our second time our trio has performed in Waikanae – our concert last July led to an immediate reinvitation thanks to a trust set up by some very generous Waikanae audience members. We were very happy to oblige as soon as possible! 

We performed Haydn E Major, Schubert B Flat, Kats-Chernin Wild Swans and Mendelssohn C Minor trios. We had been a bit anxious about this performance, as it was our first performance of all four (very challenging) works in our program, plus being our first ever performance with Julian Smiles. With a new member in the trio, even after intensive rehearsals, you never know how the concert is going to go until you’re all on stage together. Fortunately, Julian was wonderful to perform with. It was amazing how well he fit into our ensemble, blending when required but also driving phrases at other times, and always providing a solid pulse that is so important in the role of the cellist. Plus he had some really stunningly beautiful solos. It was a pleasure to share the stage with him – we all ended up really enjoying ourselves! 

The wonderful thing about performing chamber music, in particular piano trios, is the very special, improvisatory feeling that you get when all three players connect. It’s as if all players are linked together by an invisible thread, but also have the freedom to be individuals at the same time. This allows musical conversations to occur – each player feeds of one another. It makes performing very fun and spontaneous, allowing performers to pass around phrases like a game of ball, mimick one another, converse between the instruments, interrupt one another, joke with one another, or sing together. This was certainly the feeling we all experienced during our Waikanae performance. Our concert received a packed audience of over 300 people, with very enthusiastic response. After the concert, we were taken to a lovely restaurant in Waikanae by members of the committee, where we enjoyed some lively conversation and delicious New Zealand wines.

After a few hour’s sleep, we rose at 4am to catch the 6am flight back to Sydney. Now we will begin preparations for our next concert at Pitt St Uniting Church, which will take place this Friday night.