Be there at the beginning, the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a a great international career. The Amatis Piano Trio, winners of the 2015 Parkhouse Award, were the unanimous choice of the jury which comprised John Gilhooly, Colin Lawson, Hamish Milne, Madeleine Mitchell and Moray Welsh under the guiding eye of chairman Chris de Souza.
The members of the Amatis Piano Trio: Mengjie Han (piano), Lea Hausmann (violin) and Samuel Shepherd (cello) are based in Amsterdam and their performance for the Parkhouse Award is the only chance to hear them in the UK during 2016. They will perform trios by Schubert and Shostakovich.
Their programme is one of beginnings and endings: Shostakovich’s first piano trio, youthfully impetuous and lyrical followed by his second bearing the pain of a friend’s untimely death and the siege of Leningrad, preceded by Schubert’s gigantic masterpiece, his Piano Trio No 2 in E flat major, Op 100, D929, written in the last year of his short life.
The Amatis Piano Trio was founded in Amsterdam in 2013. In addition to winning the Parkhouse Award in 2015, this year they won second prize and audience prize at the International Joseph Joachim Chamber Music Competition in Weimar which was followed immediately by a tour of Hong Kong and Indonesia. The trio has performed extensively throughout Europe and has appeared at many festivals including Salzburg Chamber Music Festival, Grachtenfestival Amsterdam, Beethoven Festival Bonn, Janine Jansen’s Utrecht Chamber Music Festival and Festival Pablo Casals in France.
In 2015 the trio members became the youngest finalists of the International Chamber Music Competition ‘Schubert und die Musik der Moderne’ in Graz, Austria and shortly after were named ‘Dutch Classical Talent 2015/16’. The Amatis Piano Trio is committed to modern music and thus founded the ‘Dutch Piano Trio Composition Prize’ encouraging young composers to help further the piano trio repertoire. The trio has been part of the European Chamber Music Academy since 2015.