This Sunday night at 7:30pm at the Winnipeg Arts Gallery’s Muriel Richardson Auditorium, the Winnipeg Chamber Music Society makes its long awaited return to the live in person concert stage. And what better way to make a return to the stage with the exhilarating, heroic and perfectly crafted music of Beethoven.

They will perform two trios by Beethoven, his piano trio in C minor op.1 no 3, and one of his more iconic piano trios, the magnificent Archduke trio.

The concert originally started out as a way marking Beethoven’s 250th anniversary of his birth which took place last year, but when COVID hit and everything closed down the concert was put on hold, but as Moroz rightly points out, “I don’t think we need an excuse of a great big anniversary to play Beethoven.”

The Hoebig-Moroz trio has been performing together since 1979, and it is really a family affair. David Moroz is the area head of the piano faculty at the University of Manitoba and is the pianist for the Hoebig-Moroz Trio. His wife Gwen Hoebig is the concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and is the violinist for the trio, and her brother Desmond is the pianist for the trio. Desmond Hoebig has held the chair of principal cellist with the Cleveland, Houston and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, and is currently is on Faculty at The Sheppard School of Music at Rice University in Houston.

These three phenomenal musicians have played all of Beethoven’s piano trios, and have an intimate knowledge of Beethoven’s writing for the genre, and know how the piano trio evolved as Beethoven composed more and more music for that kind of ensemble.

In regards to the difference in writing between the two trios, the Hoebig-Moroz trio will be performing on Sunday, Moroz states, “There’s a difference in writing between all of the instruments. The Op 1 trio that we are starting with was one of the first works that Beethoven decided he wanted to have published…this is a really significant moment in a composer’s life. By the time the Archduke trio comes around Beethoven had written, I think seven of his symphonies and he had written many of his string quartets; he had written so much and was a confident composer…by that point he was the greatest living composer, and so he approached the writing of music in a different way.”

Two amazing piano trios by Beethoven, performed by an outstanding ensemble that is tied together not only through music, but family ties, make for a recital that is sure to be astounding. What better way to mark the return of chamber music to Winnipeg’s concert stages, than with the Hoebig-Moroz trio!

The concert is this Sunday, November 14th, at 7:30pm at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium. For more information, and to get tickets for this celebration of Beethoven click here:

http://wcms.mb.ca/concerts.html

To see Chris Wolf’s conversation with David Moroz click here: