NCH Chamber Music Series Spring 2027: Paddington Trio: Freakshow

NCH Chamber Music Series Spring 2027: Paddington Trio: Freakshow

About the show

Tuulia Hero, violin 
Patrick Moriarty, cello 
Stephanie Tang, piano

Sam Perkin     Freakshow 
- The Rat Circus
- The Two-Headed Nightingale
- The Living Skeleton
- The Gentle Giant
- The Angel of Death
- Pandora’s Basket
- The Armless Fiddler
Maurice Ravel     Piano Trio in A minor, M.67
Franz Schubert     Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, D.929 

From contemporary Ireland to the masterpieces of Ravel and Schubert

The Paddington Trio makes its National Concert Hall debut with a captivating programme that brings together contemporary Irish music and two towering masterpieces of the piano trio repertoire.

The concert opens with Irish composer Sam Perkin’s Freakshow, commissioned to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. A vivid suite of seven musical portraits, the work draws inspiration from extraordinary characters and stories from history, including the Rat Circus, the Two-Headed Nightingale, the Living Skeleton, the world’s tallest man and the remarkable Armless Fiddler. Full of colour, character and imagination, Freakshow offers a striking contemporary opening to the programme.

The music then moves to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor, completed in 1914 as Europe stood on the brink of the First World War. A masterpiece of the twentieth-century chamber repertoire, Ravel’s Trio is renowned for its shimmering colours, rhythmic energy and extraordinary precision, balancing delicacy and intensity in equal measure.

The programme concludes with Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, composed during the final year of the composer’s life. Monumental in scale yet intimate in expression, the work combines soaring melodies, dramatic contrasts and profound lyricism, standing as one of Schubert’s greatest chamber works.

Spanning two centuries and three very different musical worlds, this programme celebrates the remarkable versatility of the piano trio, from Perkin’s imaginative portraits of extraordinary lives, through Ravel’s luminous modernism, to the expansive emotional landscape of Schubert.

The Paddington Trio brings its distinctive energy, colour and musicality to this compelling programme, following acclaimed performances described by The Guardian as “Music [that] can take you anywhere, when played like this.”

Presented by NCH

Topics

Classical

More Music

See all events