The Inner Ear podcast is in development, being tended to in those oasis-like moments when I'm not running around London with a cello on my back. The first series is growing and will be ready to share with you all from this summer 2025.
This year also marks 25 years of the Lawson Trio - the group I play with that came up with the idea of Inner Ear as a podcast. I've been a part of the trio for 18 of those years - commissioning, discovering and sharing new music, and juxtaposing it with all the wonderful rep that so many genius humans put together before we got here.
Piano Trio always feels like a genre-title I need to unpack - as it's one of those esoteric classical music terms that is shy to explain itself. As amazing as 3 pianos might be, that's not what we're up to. The regular instrument combo for a 'Piano Trio' is piano, violin and cello - and has a ton of possibilities in texture and sonority that composers have always enjoyed exploring, (from when pianos existed that is, so starting with people like Haydn and Mozart).
As well as playing cello in a way that those 18th century composers would recognise, I can't resist diving into all the new ways that you can electronically manipulate those acoustic sounds. All of us acoustic performers are always in search of yummy sound-spaces to make sound in - churches and cathedrals, maybe even caves, winning out through their dimensions and range of hard, reflective surfaces. But electronica drops those spaces into the convenient dimensions of your own laptop - allowing you to hear your own sound completely fresh with cascading echoing delays and reverberence -