For years besides the orchestra, he had been playing cello/piano duets with Robert Shultz, and cello with violinist Bruce Yu, both of San Francisco. But the repertoire was not endless.
“I was at a loss for cello and piano,” Calvert said mournfully. “We’d played through everything.”
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So he did. Sight-reading, the three ran through the Trio No. 7 in B-flat by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827,) Op. 97 (1811.) The results surprised them.
“The sound really worked!” crowed Calvert. “It was like putting two wines together and suddenly, we had electricity.”
Very soon after that, they started the Trio Cabrillo, which will reprise the fateful Beethoven work, plus Haydn and Dvorak trios, in concert Sunday evening, Oct. 4, to benefit the Coastside Community Orchestra scholarship program.
It will take place at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Community United Methodist Church, 777 Miramontes St. in Half Moon Bay. Admission is $10 for adults, with students and kids under 10 admitted free.
The 50-member local orchestra, founded in 1983, has awarded nearly 100 scholarships, and gives children’s concerts and “petting zoos” for children to try out the instruments of the orchestra. Scholarship recipients have played with the orchestra.
As the piano trio — violin, cello, piano — repertoire is plentiful, Calvert doesn’t worry about running out of music soon. Instead the trio focuses on refining a sound that’s already smooth, based on their mutual love of classical trio music and personal harmony.
They have a smooth, free, open sound, without friction or clashes over whose instrument will dominate.
“We seem to be free of that,” said Calvert, whose wife, Michaele “Mikey” Benedict, is an established Coastside piano teacher and Coastside Chorale accompanist. “We play in a way that no one dominates another person.”
The Beethoven trio is nicknamed “the Archduke” because it was dedicated to an Austrian archduke named Rudolph, an amateur pianist who studied composition under Beethoven.
It will also include the Piano Trio No. 39 in G major, Hob. XV (25) (1795) by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809.) Rounding it out will be the trio in E Minor, Op. 90 by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904.) It is the last of his four piano trios, one which he performed himself in his native Bohemia before relocating to the New World.
Yu started studying violin at age 5 and later served as principal second violin and assistant concertmaster of the Chicago Youth Symphony, concertmaster with the Stanford Chamber Orchestra and principal second violin with the Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra of Los Altos.
Pianist Shultz, hailed as “one of the most important of this season’s newcomers” by the San Francisco Chronicle following his debut, has played with the San Francisco Symphony under Arthur Fiedler and with Oakland, Fresno and Peninsula symphonies. He taught piano at Dominican College for 25 years.
Later this season, he will appear with the Coastside Community Orchestra as a featured soloist in the second Saint-Saens piano concerto.
Cellist Calvert began his career at age 18 as the youngest member of the Sacramento Symphony. He spent two seasons with the Aspen Festival in Colorado, and taught elementary-school music in San Francisco and England. Upon returning to America in 1995, he continued with the Sacramento Symphony, commuting to concerts after settling in Montara in 1997.
His goal with the trio, he said, is to see what happens.
“We’re really for the music,” he said. “We’re there to make music as nice as possible for people to listen to.”
For concert information, contact Calvert at 728-5112.
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