Banish those winter blues by joining nadsa concerts in welcoming the Pomegranate Piano Trio in their first concert of 2018, taking place at the Courtenay Centre, Newton Abbot, tomorrow (January 21) at 3pm.

Highly successful musicians in their own right, Fenella Barton (violin), Rebecca Hepplewhite (cello) and Andrew West (piano) formed the Pomegranate Trio in 2014.

Highlights of their combined solo and chamber concerts have been at venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wiener Musikverein, La Salle Cortot, Paris, The Lincoln Center, New York, and Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

Having recently performed a variety of contemporary works, this concert returns to piano trio classics: Haydn trio in E flat major (HobXV/29), the passionate and less-often heard Smetana trio (Op 15), and Beethoven ‘Archduke’.

Haydn composed his last piano trio during his second visit to London (when he was 65), dedicating it to the outstanding pianist Therese Jansen Bartolozzi. It is full of Haydn’s humour, wistfulness and exuberance.

In contrast, Smetana’s lone and empassioned trio, written at the age of 31, is an elegiac milestone of romanticism heralding the likes of Brahms and Dvorak. The piece was driven by the devastation he felt following the death of his eldest daughter at the age of 4 from scarlet fever

Completed in 1811, the Archduke, considered by Beethoven himself to be among one of his very finest creations, was the last piece that the great composer played in public: an occasion made all the more poignant by his inability to hear any of it. Considered by many to be his greatest piano trio, it is certainly one of the most frequently performed.

The concert is sponsored by The C and M Pike Trust