AYAKA SANO
The Black Oak Ensemble (from left, David Cunliffe, Desirée Ruhstrat and Aurélien Fort Pederzoli) will perform in Morris Township, Sept. 11.
The Black Oak Ensemble string trio takes a somewhat minimalist approach to the art of the chamber ensemble. But violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, violist Aurélien Fort Pederzoli and cellist David Cunliffe play with as much vitality and poeticism as a traditional string quartet, and the unconventional configuration lends both a richness and starkness to the pure string sound.
Concertgoers will have the opportunity to hear this on Sept. 11 at the Back Deck series at The Morris Museum in Morris Township, an outdoor summer music festival that is held on the museum’s elevated parking deck.
The program, which wasn’t finalized at the time of the interview, will take a similar approach to the music played at the trio’s last Back Deck appearance in 2023, which paired classical standards by Bach, Beethoven, Piazzolla and de Falla with a handful of works by contemporary composers heard on the trio’s studio recordings.
“In general, we make our programs in a way that is music that we would like to hear,” Pederzoli says. “It’s almost very selfish that way, but I would go to one of our concerts and I would probably enjoy it (laughs). I’m not someone who would want to sit through a whole Bruckner symphony or something like that and I think that resonates a lot with some of our audiences.”
The standard string trio repertoire is meaningful but sparse, and the group is on a mission to expand both the medium and the canon, either through commissions or the discovery of rarely heard works. Much of the music they record is contemporary, but not of the avant-garde variety that sends some classical music enthusiasts running for the hills. The compositions they play mostly draw on the vernacular of classical music traditions. It is often serene and elegant music.
AYAKA SANO
David Cunliffe, left, with Desirée Ruhstrat and Aurélien Fort Pederzoli of Black Oak Ensemble.
“There is new music and new music,” says Pederzoli. “There is what people think new music is, and then there is what new music actually is.
“It’s true that there’s a lot of stuff that’s written in a very complex way that you need a booklet to figure out what’s going on, but there is also new music that sounds very accessible and easy to listen to, and we gravitate towards this kind of music a lot more. The whole album of Dance of the Night Sky is like that.”
Dance of the Night Sky, their third and most recent recording (released in May), features contemporary music by eight female British composers. The title work is a new commission by composer Shirley J. Thompson, and the album was inspired by a piece she had composed for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 soccer tournament titled “Momentum: Concerto for Football and Orchestra.”
“For the trio, maybe it is not a prerequisite, but it is important that there is a melody or a sense of lyricism,” says Pederzoli. “And basically, the new music that we play and the new music that we will play in Morristown is stuff that is very easy to listen to and very easy to grasp, but not necessarily simplistic. It’s very well-crafted and it’s a fantastic way to get into new music.”
DAVID CUNLIFFE
The trio’s 2019 debut album, Silenced Voices, featured rediscovered early 20th century works by Jewish composers whose music was suppressed by the Nazis during World War II. Most of these composers died during The Holocaust.
Their 2022 followup, Avant l’orage: French String Trios 1926–1939, uncovered rarely heard French string trios written between the two world wars that had been languishing in a French music store. Tracks included world premieres of works by Henri Tomasi, Robert Casadesus and Gustave Samazeuilh.
The ensemble, named after the tree native to Illinois, was formed in 2015 in Chicago. At first they functioned more like a quartet — a string trio plus guitarist Goran Ivanovic — and they played mostly popular and folk music.
“The idea about Black Oak is that it was sort of a core of three string players and we could add another player like a pianist to make it like a piano quartet, for example, or a bandoneon or a singer, or anything like that,” says Cunliffe.
DESIRÉE RUHSTRAT
The cellist, who is from England, also founded the Argyll String Quartet and is a founding member of The Virtuosi Chicago Chamber Orchestra. Both he and the Swiss-American Ruhstrat are founding members of The Lincoln Trio, a Chicago-based piano trio formed in 2003.
French-born Pederzoli, who is also a founding member of The Spektral Quartet, trained as a violinist before switching to the viola. “The three of us would get together and drink wine, and play music, but for two violins and a cello, there is not a lot of repertoire,” he says.
They experimented with Cunliffe switching from cello to piano, but still, Pederzoli says, “although David is a great pianist, it was not enough for us to take it on the road.”
The moment he switched from violin to viola, everything clicked. Cunliffe and Ruhstrat were scheduled to play a concert with a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That person called out sick and Ruhstrat tapped Pederzoli, still a violinist at the time, to play the viola part.
“I had never played viola before,” he recalls. “I couldn’t read the clef, and it was Beethoven’s String Trio No. 3, which is a very difficult piece, so I basically wrote the names of the notes above every note, and pulled through. And then I fell in love with the instrument, and that’s kind of how it got started.
AURÉLIEN FORT PEDERZOLI
“We realized there was much more demand for a string trio than a string trio and guitar, and we just kind of made our way into it. The string trio itself is kind of a neglected medium, so we started discovering a lot of music that hadn’t been played before and we’re also sort of on a mission to expand the repertoire as well.”
These days Pederzoli calls New Jersey home. He moved to New Brunswick about four years ago, after living in East Millstone in Somerset County. He has played at The Morris Museum’s Bickford Theatre often over the years, both in recital and with The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
He has also sat as a principal violist with The Princeton Symphony Orchestra a couple of times. In March, the trio played a concert for the Symphony’s new chamber music series at Trinity Church in Princeton.
Cunliffe says although he has no New Jersey connections, “I’m always happy to be back!”
The performance will mark the penultimate concert of the 2025 Back Deck season — the sixth of the annual summer series founded in 2000.
The Black Oak Ensemble will perform at the Back Deck series at The Morris Museum in Morris Township, Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Visit morrismuseum.org.
For more on the group, visit blackoakensemble.com.
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