[image: The Horszowski Trio. Inset: William Anderson]
Since their New York debut in 2011, the Horszowski Trio – Jesse Mills, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano – has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, the Far East, and India, earning a reputation as one of the most vital chamber ensembles of their generation. The centerpiece of their concert is the U.S. premiere of 25 Decades, a piano trio by William Kentner Anderson — composer, guitarist, and Director of Classical and New Music for The Village Trip — performed alongside Brahms' Piano Trio No. 2 in C major, Op 87, a pairing that sets Anderson's new work in direct conversation with the Romantic tradition it both inherits and unsettles.
Brahms understood the bourgeois interior as both refuge and horizon — a world worth holding together, even as its edges frayed. Anderson's composition is in quiet argument with that inheritance: musical elements that cohere, that genuinely reach toward one another, while registering — just beneath the surface — the centrifugal forces that no amount of craft can entirely resolve. The work does not mourn this. It simply knows it.
Anderson comes to composition from a post-maximalist perspective, having worked closely with Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and George Walker, among others. The Horszowski Trio, a passionate advocate for new music, has commissioned and premiered numerous works, making them natural collaborators for a piece as ambitious and searching as this one.
The Horszowski Trio takes its inspiration from the musicianship, integrity, and humanity of the pre-eminent pianist Mieczysław Horszowski, whose last pupil at the Curtis Institute was the Trio's own pianist. The New Yorker thought them "the most compelling American group to come on the scene" while the Boston Globe found them "eloquent and enthralling."
