Carnegie Hall, New York
April 17, 2018

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Lady, ya gotta practice”. It’s a hoary chestnut, but like all such ancient saws it holds more than a grain of truth. Clearly a quite evident amount of practice has paid off for Trio Vitruvi, a young Danish piano trio making its Carnegie debut and comprising one fully-fledged Dane (cellist Jacob la Cour) and a pair of halflings, Swiss-Danish violinist Niklas Walentin and Aussie-Danish pianist Alexander McKenzie.

Trio Vitruvi, Carnegie HallTrio Vitruvi. Photo © Tom McKenzie

Formed in 2013, the trio carried off top honours in Danish National Radio’s P2 Chamber Music Competition in 2014 as well as winning the Jurmala International Music Competition the same year. With evident eagerness to get out of their bow ties at the end, the fresh-faced threesome look like they left Hogwarts just yesterday, but don’t be fooled, there’s a maturity to their playing that belies their ages. Perhaps it was the fruits of two years study of what McKenzie describes as “the philosophy behind music as a language,” with Hatto Beyerle, one of the founders of the Alban Berg Quartet, but this...