Trio Naturale

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Trio Naturale (left to right): John Wunderlin, Thomas Kasdorf, Valerie Sanders.

press release: Trio Naturale will be performing two works for Piano, Violin and Natural Horn on Saturday, May 12, at 7pm in the Oakwood West Auditorium and again on Friday, May 18 at 12 noon at First Unitarian Society's Noon Musicale. The program is approximately 1 hour and is free and open to the public.

Trio Naturale is a chamber ensemble formed in 2018 to perform works originally written for natural horn. The ensemble consists of Valerie Sanders on violin, Thomas Kasdorf on piano and John Wunderlin on natural horn. The French horn of the 18th and early 19th century was not the same instrument that modern horn players use. It was a simple long tube of brass with exchangeable 'crooks' used to set the key for the instrument and had no keys or valves. The instrument could only play pitches that were in the harmonic series without using their hand.   Players of the time would use their hand to add additional pitches so the instrument could play more than two octaves of all the chromatic pitches. In doing this, the non-harmonic notes had a different timbre than the harmonic pitches - some notes would be muffled and some notes quiet but very brassy. The composers of the time knew this and factored it into their compositions.  For our inaugural performance at Oakwood Village, we will be performing the Mozart Quintet K407 (originally for string quartet and horn, transcribed for the trio) and the Brahms trio in its original form, so the audience can experience more closely these compositions as they were originally conceived.