Performances + Events
To sit down with Trio Eris, NEC’s Piano Trio in Residence, is to observe embraced camaraderie and a sincere and joyful appreciation for the collaboration on which chamber music is built. The individual members of the ensemble — violinist K. J. McDonald ’25 GD, cellist Annie Seeun Hyung ’26 MM, and pianist Andrew Jun Chen ’24 MM — came together as a group at NEC in spring 2023.
McDonald, who knew then-NEC faculty member and Chamber Music Department Chair Merry Peckham from the Perlman Music Program, where she is on the faculty, emailed her on his way to NEC asking to be matched with chamber chamber musicians. Peckham, in turn, wrote to Hyung — who also knew McDonald from the Perlman Program — asking, Hyung remembered, “Annie. Piano trio?” And Chen had had coachings with Peckham at NEC. “She linked us all together,” he said. In April 2023, the three musicians met on a FaceTime call and Trio Eris was born.
In the ensuing weeks and months, McDonald said, “we rehearsed our butts off.” Though the possibility of auditioning for NEC’s Professional Piano Trio Program was “on the table from the get go,” Hyung said, “We were really just having fun getting to know each other.” In February 2024, the trio did successfully audition for the program, performing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in G major, Op. 1, No. 2, Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66, and Carter’s Epigrams (2012).
Today, Trio Eris is in the first year of a two-year residency to which a third year could be added. In NEC’s Professional Piano Trio Program, the Piano Trio in Residence is mentored by pianist and NEC faculty member Vivian Hornik Weilerstein.
Watch Trio Eris’s recent appearance on NEC Studio Sessions, a digital performance series that offers members of the NEC community an opportunity to express themselves in an intimate setting.
Trio Eris has already made much of the opportunity. The group traveled in January to the Panama Jazz Festival, where it performed and taught alongside other musicians from NEC. In April, Trio Eris will spend a week in the UK at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
Before those engagements the ensemble will perform in the semifinal round of the prestigious Concert Artists Guild competition and appear in recital on NEC’s Concert Artists Series in a program of music by NEC alumna Katherine Balch ’14 NEC/Tufts, Ravel, and Schubert. Balch’s different gravities (2023) is a piece Trio Eris has performed before, as part of the NEC Festival in November.
“We stayed with (Balch) in New Haven,” Hyung said, “to workshop the piece. It was a really interesting experience for us to really feel connected to the music.”
Balch is on the composition faculty at the Yale School of Music, in New Haven, Conn. In addition to her different gravities, Trio Eris will perform Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor, M. 67, and Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, D. 929, works McDonald described as “mainstays of the repertoire.” Balch’s piece, he said, is “a good showcase of our strengths.” The program, he said, represents the culmination of Trio Eris’s work together so far.
Chen described the trio’s time at NEC and the coaching they’ve received from Vivian Hornik Weilerstein and faculty member Donald Weilerstein as amazing. Hornik Weilerstein, Chen said, is “the perfect person to kind of nurture us as a growing chamber group. She’s always trying to look out for our group sound.”
That sound will fill Jordan Hall on March 13, when Trio Eris appears in recital on NEC’s Concert Artists Series — two days after competing in the semifinal round of the Concert Artists Guild competition. Beyond that opportunity and the March 13 Concert Artists Series recital, Trio Eris are enthusiastically dedicated to their shared goal.
