Recent Reviews
SLO Review: San Luis Obispo County’s Connection to Arts and Culture, November 2, 2025
Shao and Friends Demonstrate World-Class Artistry
By Andrew J. Glick
For her farewell concert as this year’s Festival Mozaic Artist in Residence, cellist Sophie Shao teamed up with pianist Amy I-Lin Cheng and violinist Carmit Zori to take the audience on an exciting and awe-inspiring acoustical ride through the past 140 years of chamber music involving the ensemble’s instrumentation.
The afternoon concert on Sunday, October 26 at Cuesta College’s Harold J. Miosi Cultural and Performing Arts Center began with a pre-concert lecture by Cal Poly musicologist and music historian Alyson McLamore. She explored creative links among the three works and the possible influences of each composer’s cultural environment.
Shao created the program by choosing a single work from today and each of the past two centuries to showcase certain aspects of the evolution of the craft of composition. Interestingly, she decided to travel backward through the ages.
In at least the first and third pieces, I heard reactions to stressors in the cultural and physical environments. I’d like to take a granular look at some techniques within each work used to reflect those influences.
For our current century, Shao chose a work she commissioned last year from MIT composer Elena Ruehr, “Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 2.” This performance was its California premiere. In the program notes, Ruehr says “One of the things … on my mind lately is the anxiety we feel about our changing planet. It seems to me that we are in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.” This results from our awareness of the danger posed by pollution-prone products and services that we’ve grown accustomed to using and tend to rely on.
Ruehr explains that in her sonata she sends the cello “on a journey, reacting and interacting with the environment the piano creates.” Besides anxiety, she says, “It is interspersed with the joy and comfort we find in the natural world.”
Ruehr’s use of the mostly post-19th-century compositional environment called the octatonic scale, combined with a much earlier structural technique known as a passacaglia, served her well to evoke the element of anxiety.
The octatonic scale consists of alternating half-steps and whole-steps that tends to keep the listener guessing what and where the central pitch is. In the modern use of the passacaglia, a short series of pitches is continually presented in different configurations, often layered, further thwarting a sense of predictability. Her “joy and comfort” were most noticeable in the diatonic major triads at the end of each movement.
Shao and Cheng collaborated in a sensitive and nuanced treatment of Ruehr’s work, deftly illustrating the emotional content of the composer’s art.
Charles Ives’s “Piano Trio,” finished in 1914, portrays the sense of unbridled mirth he felt while reminiscing about his college days at Yale University. So much was he in this frame of mind while composing it that he subtitled the second movement “TSIAJ”—an abbreviation of “This Scherzo Is A Joke.” A true musical innovator, he begins the work like a Japanese No play, introducing each of the two string instruments with a different register accompaniment from the piano, then combining them into a quasi-quartet with Ives’ own unique layering of multiple tonalities, rhythms and timbres.
The TSIAJ movement dives into the happily sentimental territory of turn-of-the-century frat life by creating a hodgepodge of melodies derived from tunes popular with the fraternity brothers of the time.
The final movement is a mellower, more straightforward depiction of Ives’ memory of an on-campus Sunday church service, quoting snippets of various Protestant hymns ending with an almost direct quote of “Rock of Ages.”
One has to marvel at the adroitness of Shao, Cheng and Zori when tackling this work—accepting all its eccentricities with confidence and dedication to preserving the composer’s unique expressiveness. Really exceptional!
With Antonín Dvořák’s “Piano Trio No. 3,” we arrive at the later years of the 19th century. The cultural stressor Dvořák is reacting to might be called “Austrian Exceptionalism”—in particular, if a composition didn’t reflect the same level of perceived drama and heft as a work by Brahms, it was somehow inferior.
Dvořák’s reaction in this trio was to almost completely abandon references to the popular music of his Czech homeland and incorporate many of the elements of his friend Brahms’s compositions instead. As McLamore pointed out, these included 2-against-3 cross rhythms (e.g. triplet eighth-notes in the bass against duplets in the melodic lines), denser harmonies and adherence to more formal Classical-era structures like the sonata allegro.
Shao and friends again demonstrated their world-class artistry by maintaining the heft and grandeur dear to the hearts of late 19th century Austrian audiences, without abandoning the sensibilities of Dvořák’s craft.
As evinced by the audience’s standing ovation, we can say to Shao, Cheng and Zori, “So well done! Please return soon!”
By Andrew J. Glick, SLO Review: San Luis Obispo County’s Connection to Arts and Culture (November 2, 2025)
Andrew J. Glick is a former classical music reviewer for Copley Los Angeles Newspapers. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from USC and a master of music degree in composition from Syracuse University. He has been a professional flutist and bass baritone for more than 20 years, performing in venues such as the Beach Cities Symphony and recording sessions for London Records. He has sung with the Syracuse Opera Company and the University of Virginia Opera Workshop. He was a founding member of the Cambridge Singers of Pasadena. He lives in Atascadero.
Link to article here:
https://sloreview.org/2025/11/02/shao-and-friends-demonstrate-world-class-artistry/
The Middlebury Campus: Arts & Culture, September 18, 2025
A musical playdate: Sophie Shao & Friends
Sophie Shao & Friends perform in the Olin C. Robinson Concert Hall.
By Kiara Dookie
The opening notes of the trio Sophie Shao & Friends pulsed through Robinson Hall, the air charged with anticipation. The three women — cellist Shao, violinist Carmit Zori, and pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute — launched into an evening of intimacy and intensity, the kind of performance where silence carried as much weight as the music itself. This balance of poise and focus reflects why Shao’s presence in Middlebury’s Performing Arts Series has come to mark the start of each semester, and her performance this past Saturday was no exception.
For the 106th season, she designed a program that honored the college’s recently opened “Le Petit Salon” exhibit, weaving together French baroque elegance, pioneering American composition, contemporary innovation, and the sweeping emotion of nineteenth-century Romanticism. This impressive repertoire reflects more than just curatorial skill; it grows from a career marked by international acclaim.
At 19, she received the Avery Fisher Career Grant, one of classical music’s most prestigious awards, and went on to earn top prizes at the Rostropovich and Tchaikovsky competitions while performing at major halls worldwide. Critics praise her expressive range and the dynamism she brings to even the most familiar repertoire. This international reputation made her annual return to Middlebury all the more special: The chance to experience a world-class musician not on a distant stage, but in the intimate setting chamber music was designed for.
The evening opened with Amy Beach’s “Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 150”, beginning the concert with elegance and intensity. The “Allegro” carried a restless energy that surged through the hall, its urgency heightened by the knowledge that Beach composed it at a time when women were expected to perform rather than create. This awareness lent the music an added depth, as if each phrase bore the weight of her determination to claim space within the canon.
The “Lento espressivo” followed with a lyrical tenderness that was contemplative yet unafraid of dissonance. The trio then launched into the “Presto, Allegro con brio” with clarity and vigor that was both exhilarating and exacting. Shao, Zori, and Jokubaviciute each captured the full range of the piece with remarkable sensitivity, giving the quieter moments a luminous stillness and the surging passages a brilliance that seemed to lift the music beyond the page. Their interpretation revealed not only the refinement of Beach’s writing, but also the daring ambition that once startled nineteenth-century audiences and still commands attention today.
From there, the program shifted to François Couperin’s “Concerts Royaux” (1722), a deliberate homage to the French salon culture echoed in the museum’s exhibit. On paper, Couperin’s ornamented miniatures can seem like delicate curiosities; in performance, they became something far more alive. Each phrase shimmered with nuance, the ensemble breathing as though they shared a single set of lungs. Their restraint was its own kind of eloquence, and the hall seemed briefly transformed into a salon of another century, a space where music was less of a performance and more of a conversation.
For me, the centerpiece of the night came from Elena Ruehr’s “Cello Sonata No. 2”, composed specifically for Shao, her close friend. The work created a wholly different landscape, less polished, but wrestling with fragility and resilience. As Ruehr detailed in the performance’s program, her compositions seek to bring narrative and emotion to audible life, an impulse that seemed to resonate in every measure of the sonata.
At times, the cello’s voice plunged downward, heavy with shadow, before rising with a kind of defiance; at others, the piano pressed against it, offering both resistance and consolation. This dissonance between the two instruments felt deliberate; it underscored the unease of holding both destruction and hope, turning the music into a meditation on a world shaped by beauty and decay.
That sense of struggle became even more vivid in pianist Jokubaviciute’s performance. She leaned into each note as though her body could press the sound further into being, bending toward the keys with a physical intensity that mirrored the score’s emotional demands. Her playing at times swelled against Shao’s cello, at other times flowed seamlessly into it, the two instruments sometimes indistinguishable. Their dialogue carried an imperfect harmony, a reminder that music, like nature, is not about erasing tension but about finding meaning within it.
The concert closed with Dvořák, a composer whose music often exists in a realm of in-between. His work, perfectly selected for the finale, felt like a gentle, liberating exhale. For many, it provided the catharsis that only comes at week’s end; for me, it resonated with the breathless start of the semester. After days that already felt like a sprint, the work’s surging rhythms and sweeping lines captured both exhaustion and exhilaration, as if the music itself were negotiating the shift from summer’s stillness to autumn’s urgency. The final notes rang out with both culmination and renewal.
What gave the evening its power was not only the repertoire but the ensemble’s synergy. Shao’s playing is celebrated for its rich, resonant tone, but what stood out was her capacity to listen. Every glance, every held breath, every pause signaled attunement among the musicians, making this chamber music in its truest form: not a collection of solos, but a dialogue woven from trust and time.
As the audience filtered into the night, there lingered a sense of having been taken somewhere both beyond campus and intimately close. The concert honored the salon tradition while stretching far past it, spanning centuries and continents to tell a story rooted in the present moment. For those at the threshold of another demanding semester, it offered more than beauty; it offered orientation. Through a sound that was at once grounding and transcendent, Shao, Zori, and Jokubaviciute gave us not just a concert but a compass, to steady ourselves as we step into the season ahead.
Link here:
https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/2025/09/a-musical-playdate-sophie-shao-friends
The Layers, Herschel Garfein
Marnie Breckenridge, soprano; Sophie Shao, Dave Eggar, cello; John Blacklow, Michael Brofman, Thomas Bagwell, piano (AcisAPL92317; 57:19)
“The Layers was commissioned by Sophie Shao, a much-lauded young cellist who is one of the most promising artists of her generation. Garfein tells us in the program notes that he thought of this project in unconventional terms from the start, conceiving of it as a theatrical work in which the cello would embody a particular character in a particular place. Garfein eventually settled upon the poem "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), a gifted writer who twice served as our nation's poet laureate. This poem is a breathtaking reflection on what it means to seek for life's meaning amid the mounting losses that are an inevitable part of the human journey.
The title of each of the three movements are derived from words in the poem. The title of the poem actually comes from this striking passage: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." The opening movement has an aching eloquence to it, with the cello given a soaring, singing line. The second movement features a bewitching juxtaposition of a similar sort of lyrical line laid atop a steadily throbbing piano accompaniment. For the final movement, Garfein has fashioned a delightful Klezmer tune in the time signature 5/4, which the composer aptly characterizes as "both steady and unpredictable." The work culminates in a spirit of well worn, somewhat melancholy hope. We have heard this kind of exquisitely bittersweet music from the composer before; he knows exactly how to strike this sort of deeply emotional chord. Sophie Shao's playing of this piece borders on the miraculous. Her tone is unfailingly gorgeous and deeply expressive. Has anybody ever made a cello sing more beautifully than this? Pianist John Blacklow is with her every step of the way, as though the two of them were sharing one musical mind.”
By Gregory Berg, The Journal of Singing: National Association of Teachers of Singing, January/February 2024