The Bergonzi Piano Trio performs Sunday, Oct. 4, at 4 p.m. at Newman Recital Hall in the University of Miami’s Knight Center for Music Innovation, 5513 San Amaro Drive. Admission is free. The concert is part of Frost Music Live’s 2026-2027 season.
Violinist Scott Flavin and cellist Ross Harbaugh are longtime members of the Frost School of Music faculty and also perform together in the Bergonzi String Quartet. Pianist Lindsay Garritson, a University of Miami doctoral graduate who now teaches at the University of Central Florida, completes the trio.
The three musicians have performed together for several years and released an album of Beethoven and Brahms trios in 2021.
Beethoven in a lighter mood
Sunday’s program moves through roughly a century of chamber music, beginning with Beethoven in an unusually playful mood.
His Variations on “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu,” Op. 121a, take their theme from a comic song by Wenzel Müller in the Viennese stage work “Die Schwestern von Prag.” Although Beethoven did not publish the variations until 1824, near the end of his life, the work is generally believed to have originated around 1803 and to have been revised later.
A dark, imposing introduction gives way to a deliberately simple tune that Beethoven takes apart and rebuilds through a succession of increasingly inventive variations. It offers a different side of a composer better known to many listeners for the scale and drama of his symphonies.
The mood changes with the Andante from Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17. Schumann composed the four-movement trio in 1846 while maintaining the concert career that had made her one of Europe’s most celebrated pianists. It was the only piano trio she completed.
The Andante provides the work’s lyrical center, built around a songlike melody interrupted by a more agitated middle passage.
The concert closes with Anton Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 32, written in 1894 in memory of Russian cellist Karl Davydov. The four-movement work moves from a lyrical opening through a quick scherzo and an elegy before returning to greater force in the finale. Its prominent cello writing makes the dedication especially apparent and gives Sunday’s program its largest and most overtly Romantic work.
Three musicians with wide-ranging careers
Flavin has taught violin at Frost since 1998 and serves as resident conductor of the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra and as resident conductor and concertmaster of the Symphony of the Americas. His work extends beyond performing: he has written four plays, composed and arranged music and published the instructional book “Complete Scales for Violin.”
Harbaugh is professor of cello and director of the strings program at Frost. He studied with Janos Starker and Leonard Rose in the United States and André Navarra at the Paris Conservatory.
As a founding member of the New World String Quartet, Harbaugh shared in the ensemble’s 1979 Naumburg Chamber Music Award and later a Grand Prix du Disque. His performances have taken him to the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall. He has also incorporated Tai Chi principles into workshops for cellists and other string players.
Garritson has built much of her career at the intersection of traditional repertoire and contemporary music. Her 2019 Carnegie Hall solo recital debut included the world premiere of Carl Vine’s Piano Sonata No. 4, which she commissioned and which Vine wrote for her. She later recorded the work on “Aphorisms: Piano Music of Carl Vine.”
She has won prizes at the Montreal International Musical Competition, the USASU Bösendorfer International Piano Competition and the Mozarteum International Chopin Competition and competed in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Garritson holds degrees from Principia College and Yale and earned her doctorate at UM.
A partnership that began at Frost
The trio debuted at Frost in 2020 with an all-Beethoven program. In November 2022, the musicians returned to UM’s Gusman Concert Hall for a program pairing Dvořák and Shostakovich and have continued performing together since.
Sunday’s concert gives Coral Gables audiences another chance to hear that partnership across three distinct musical worlds: Beethoven transforming a comic theater tune, Clara Schumann turning inward and Arensky bringing the afternoon to a full Romantic close.
The performance begins at 4 p.m. Admission is free.
