Newstead Trio—a Trio for the 21st Century

BY JAMES REEL

The old, and probably no longer tenable, chamber-ensemble paradigm was epitomized by the Beaux Arts Trio. Its members held individual teaching positions, but when it was billed as an “ensemble in residence,” that was at a performance venue, like the Library of Congress. The group was first and foremost a concert-hall entity, its repertoire weighted heavily (but not exclusively) toward the classics, and it enjoyed a long-term recording contract with a major international label.

Today’s chamber-ensemble paradigm is quite different, and it’s well represented by the Newstead Trio, founded in 1996. As do an increasing number of chamber groups, the Newstead Trio as an entity serves on a faculty, in this case that of the pre-college Pennsylvania Academy of Music. This provides a financially stable academic base from which to venture out to the world’s concert halls. The group offers a variety of outreach programs for kids from elementary through high school—not just a street-clothes presentation of standard classical pieces, but interactive presentations involving original material. In more standard recitals (including multiple tours to China), the Newstead Trio habitually mixes recent music (by the likes of Astor Piazzolla and Paul Schoenfield) and commissions (Robert Starer, Chen Yi) with the customary Mozart and Mendelssohn. And, of greatest pertinence to Fanfare readers, at a time when most of the major labels have died or accommodate very few chamber ensembles, the Newstead Trio has elected to issue recordings on a small Canadian label, Prince Productions, a division of Phoenix Records. The latest recording project couples the two piano trios of Felix Mendelssohn, commemorating the 200th anniversary of that composer’s birth.

The Newstead Trio consists of violinist Michael Jamanis, cellist Sara Male (Jamanis’s wife), and pianist Xun Pan. I was asked to interview Jamanis about the group, and before I’d bothered to read up on the ensemble I assumed I’d be talking to a pianist by the same name. Indeed, violinist Jamanis is the son of duo pianists Michael Jamanis and Frances Veri, who together founded the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in 1989. The younger Jamanis admits that, having grown up in a piano-dominated household, taking up the violin may have been a form of youthful rebellion.

“I did spend a lot of time lying under the two pianos when they were rehearsing Lutosławski or Gershwin,” he says. “Both of Xun’s parents were pianists, and he turned out to be a pianist, so sometimes it works, but maybe they don’t play Gershwin in China. My dad tried to teach me piano, but, well, I would never think of teaching my son violin. Teaching within the family doesn’t usually work out. My dad did try, but when a guy came to my school with a violin, I loved those glissandos and wanted to play that instrument.” Not that the child had been deprived of exposure to anything but the keyboard; his parents’ string-playing friends would often come over after dinner to read through Beethoven and Mozart sonatas with Veri. The first recital the five-year-old Michael was taken to featured violinist Zino Francescatti with pianist Robert Casadesus, with whom the parents had studied. “I was definitely more taken with the violinist than the pianist,” Jamanis admits. Unfortunately, the boy offended Francescatti by asking him why he had to practice onstage right before he played, while the pianist didn’t. His parents had to smooth things over by explaining to the child that the violinist wasn’t practicing, but tuning. The idea of tuning must have lodged in the kid’s brain, for when the boy got his first violin in the third grade, he retuned it so he could play a scale with minimal use of his left hand.

Once he got the hang of proper technique, the young violinist seemed destined for a career in chamber music. He played sonatas with his mother, and piano trios with two of his mom’s students, one of whom doubled as a cellist. During this period he learned to his surprise that the Brahms Piano Quintet wasn’t just the big piece for two pianos his parents used to play in arrangement, and that a certain set of two-piano variations by Lutosławski was based on a Paganini violin caprice. “It gave me a different perspective,” he says with a bit of understatement. A further revelation came when Jamanis began his college education (bachelor’s from Juilliard, master’s from Yale, doctorate from Rutgers). Most conservatory and college training at that time was meant to produce soloists, not chamber musicians. Of course, the chamber repertoire was not completely terra incognita in academic circles—students were required to have some ensemble training—and at Rutgers, Jamanis was able to study with Arnold Steinhardt, who had launched himself as both a concert soloist and orchestra concertmaster before cofounding the Guarneri Quartet, and thus had the widest perspective a violinist could have.

At Rutgers, Jamanis preferred to participate in piano trios rather than string quartets, because of his piano-friendly background. During this period, he met and began playing with Canadian cellist Male, and eventually they teamed up with Chinese pianist Xun Pan, who initially had the more soloistic style in which students were trained. “That’s the way everyone was brought up at these conservatories—you learn the concertos,” Jamanis says. “But I really wanted to be a great chamber musician.” The three hit it off immediately. Jamanis and Male got married in 1993, and Jamanis was best man at Xun Pan’s wedding the following year. They’ve produced kids in parallel too. “We’ve really grown up together in the trio,” Jamanis says. “We’ve traveled all over the world together, we teach together, we coach chamber ensembles together—as a trio, we’re pretty much married in our own way.”

In the mid 1990s, they were hired as ensemble in residence at the Pennsylvania Academy, and named the group after the donor who set up the endowment that funds the residency. “The fact that we became the resident ensemble gave us stability, and it also forced us to rehearse and come up with new programs constantly, because we had to give concerts at the school,” Jamanis says. “Grooming a new generation of chamber musicians is a big part of what we do here at the Academy. The chamber-music program is pretty comprehensive. It’s very important to the flexibility of the student. It’s not all about the solo world anymore. And chamber music has become a very versatile kind of medium. When we formed the trio, we thought we’d have a career just playing Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, and all that. But when we started going to China, we had some Chinese folk songs arranged for our trio, and that led to all sorts of other things. Now, when I think of chamber music, so many different things are possible. So many things are smudged together: classical, jazz, and rock and roll. Now we have a lot of diversity in our programming, as the whole medium of chamber music is becoming more accessible to a much wider audience.

“We each have to have a certain entrepreneurial sense now—not just as a businessperson, but as a musician. There’s no wall between you and the audience anymore as you present this work. An ensemble should be able to engage an audience beyond the music, like talking from the stage and having after-concert discussions. It’s not an easy time right now, and in the recording field in the classical music world, the numbers speak for themselves; however, I think we are creating new audiences all the time by trying to engage school kids, doing outreach programs, and using creative programming. It’s important not to squelch any student’s dreams regarding playing music. I think many times as musicians in our society we almost write ourselves off. But once people listen to the music and feel the music, they really want to participate and they really want to come to concerts. The idea is breaking down the barriers, trying not to have audiences think, ‘It’s classical music, it’s an exclusive club, I don’t belong.’ We have to get away from that. I’m not going to scoff at an audience that happens to clap in the wrong spot.”

That said, the Newstead Trio does not forsake the classics. Its latest release is Mendelssohn and nothing but, and in part it’s a return to some of the music the ensemble included in its first recording, made around 1996. “I’d forgotten we’d recorded the Mendelssohn D-Minor Trio back then, until you mentioned it,” Jamanis admits. “It’s nice to do the set now. We love both trios. We’ve done the D-Minor for ages, but having just in the last couple of years picked up the C-Minor, I can probably say for all three of us that that’s now the more preferable trio. The C-Minor has something in it that gels more.” Has the Newstead Trio’s approach to the D-Minor Trio, or any other music for that matter, changed during the past decade? “The marked difference is that now we care more about the material as a whole, how it’s one unit,” he says. “The way we looked at it before was more from selfish interest, looking at parts—‘I have the melody here, and this is what it should be.’ Whereas now the way we rehearse is all for the benefit of the music, not the individual players—how to phrase everything together, for example. As the ensemble becomes more mature and stays together a long time, it gets easier in a way, but it’s also more difficult, because we’re trying to find more in the music. Also, back in 1996, we were probably very cautious to criticize each other, and we very sensitive to criticism. Now it’s a lot different, more honest and direct but constructive, and that helps the music too.

“I don’t know if you want to call this new CD a rite of passage, but in a way it is, because we have an opportunity to celebrate Mendelssohn’s year with these two wonderful works, and even though there are already wonderful recordings of them out there, our selfish motive is to record these pieces because we love them and we want people to hear our versions. This is our time capsule. The recording process can be arduous, but recording these trios was great. The D-Minor we coached for years with all of our teachers, but especially with Bernie Greenhouse (formerly of the Beaux Arts Trio), and that means getting advice and instruction on every little detail, but on our own we’ve explored different fingerings, different bowings, and we do manage to play this for ourselves. We’ve played the Mendelssohn trios back to back in concert so many times. In Beijing this past July, we played them in a sold-out 800-seat concert hall. They came to hear us, but they also came to hear the two Mendelssohn piano trios, and that’s a testament to Mendelssohn’s music.”

Jamanis says it’s too soon to discuss the Newstead Trio’s next recording in detail, but a disc of the ensemble’s commissioned works is likely to come in the near future. “What I look forward to seeing from composers we commission is how do they understand our trio and the way we perform, and how is that coming through in the music written in a style for us? Obviously, you start by choosing composers you have a great respect for. Because we travel to China so much, Chen Yi wrote a piece for us based on Chinese folk songs, sort of like Bartók would use folk songs, very integrated, rather than what happens in the Haydn ‘Gypsy’ Trio. We worked with her back and forth, and it’s really exciting to have that kind of composer interaction. We received something a couple of days ago that the composer is hoping will be an expandable work, so we can add students when we play it in outreach concerts or on tour. It’s not that easy for the trio, but she hopes to add maybe an easy viola part, maybe some wind parts, so we can use it to integrate students from wherever we go. The customization of the work is an exciting part of it.” Just as the Newstead Trio is a chamber ensemble customized for the 21st century.