Phaeton Piano Trio

Amanda Maier belongs, alongside Alice Tegnér and Elfrida Andrée, to those Swedish women who already at the end of the nineteenth century were able to make a name for themselves as composers — she was in fact the first woman in Sweden to pass the Musikdirektor examination, and in 1876 she played her own Violin Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Carl Reinecke. Her husband, the Dutch-German composer Julius Röntgen — connected with Johannes Brahms and a lifelong friend of Edvard Grieg — supported her in this.

The Phaeton Piano Trio — three internationally celebrated soloists from the circles of the Kronberg Academy and the Royal Academy of Music London, guests of houses such as the Frick Collection in New York and the Library of Congress in Washington — frames Maier's work with two trios by men in which the brilliance of the woman is worthily reflected: the Stockholm Schubert-contemporary Franz Berwald, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose D-minor Trio is among the most virtuosic works of the genre.