Musica Viva Australia - Playing With History

Paul Kildea talks about meeting Trio Isimsiz, the UK-based ensemble making their Australian debut for Musica Viva Australia in 2025.

In the same way that you can tell a lot about a music agent from the artist list they assemble, so too can you evaluate a performer or ensemble from the composers they commission. In choosing the young Spanish composer Francisco Coll as an artistic collaborator, Trio Isimsiz (Turkish for ‘trio without name’) announced itself as a fearless, imaginative ensemble, one able to approach Coll’s considerable challenges head on, creating arguably the most superb and original addition to the piano trio repertory this century. Coll has written for them a showpiece, one that fractures the genre and then threads together disparate, brilliant jewels into a single, opulent string, its virtuosity disguised (though barely) beneath the most beguiling surface.

A showpiece that fractures the genre and then threads together disparate, brilliant jewels.

Coll himself described the piece in 2022 around the time of its UK premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival, when I was Head of Music. ‘To write a piano trio is something very important for a composer of my profile. You know, it has this historical connotation, and I like to play with history somehow... So, this was the perfect match. Everything was very stimulating for me.’

For me too: it was the resulting work that first brought to my attention the superb and easy musicianship of Trio Isimsiz.

That ‘historical connotation’ is underlined in the remainder of the ensemble’s program. Brahms’s third piano trio and Schubert’s first have legitimate claim to being the genre’s calling cards, each a four-movement 19th-century colossus, each perfectly crafted to the three individual performers and instruments involved – an almost self-conscious riposte to the genre’s less independent 18th-century forebear.

It is always a pleasure and a responsibility inviting artists to Australia for the first time. Many of you would have heard recordings or even live performances of this canonic repertory by the Beaux Arts Trio, long a touchstone ensemble for us all.

Three outstanding musicians looking to the musical past all the while they tend to its future.

It is no invidious comparison to mention Erdem, Pablo and Edvard in the same breath as that great trio, for here we have three outstanding musicians looking to the musical past all the while they tend to its future with certain steps and no small virtuosity.

Paul Kildea

Francisco Coll’s Piano Trio was commissioned for the Isimsiz Trio by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (Madrid), and Britten Pears Arts. It premiered in January 2022 in Madrid and has since appeared at the Aldeburgh Festival and Wigmore Hall. In March 2026 the trio give the US premiere of the Piano Trio as part of a focus on Coll at the Phillips Collection. 

2025 Concert Season