The CYNOSURE Trio

Three of Fairbanks’ most familiar musicians, in the most intimate setting there is. Maestro Eduard Zilberkant steps away from the podium and back to the piano, joined by violinist Yue Sun and cellist Charly Akert for Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, Op. 70 No. 1. The nickname comes from the middle movement — a slow, hovering Largo unlike anything else Beethoven wrote, full of tremolos and half-lit harmonies that seem to drift rather than move. He sketched it around the same time he was toying with an opera on Macbeth, and the witches never quite left the page. On either side of it sit two movements of pure high spirits, which only makes the haunting stretch in the middle land harder.

Chamber music is where you hear players think. No conductor, no section to hide in — just three musicians listening hard and deciding together in real time. An evening worth sitting close for.